


Cirque Cherep

by tei



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Circus, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-10-22 08:32:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 39,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17659340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tei/pseuds/tei
Summary: John Watson has wanted to be an army doctor for as long as he can remember. When he's rejected from the Armed Forces on the basis of a discriminatory psych eval, he ends up doctoring for a very different kind of corps: a circus.He makes it work.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is finished (\o/) and just needs to be edited as I post! Planning on posting Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

“Well?” says Mike. 

John slides down into the booth opposite his friend, slapping the letter on the table. He’s tucked it back into the envelope it came in, the edges of the envelope in a tatter from John’s rush to open it when it had arrived in the post that morning. 

Mike gives John a worried look. “That’s not the face of a man who’s received good news.”

“Not really, no.” John taps a passing waitress on the arm, not particularly caring about his rudeness in his rush to get a drink in him. He sees Mike slide the letter out of the envelope while he orders. When the waitress leaves and John is left with nothing to do while Mike reads the letter, he stares unseeingly at the football match behind Mike’s head. 

For all that he and Mike were best mates all through medical school, they were also neck-and-neck, academically and achievement-wise. He knows Mike will be sympathetic. He knows Mike will tell him that it’s bullshit, and that it isn’t his fault, and that it’s discrimination. And he will probably even believe it whole-heartedly. Mike is a good guy, and a beta who’s basically blind to gender both primary and secondary. So he’ll be enraged about the injustice of John’s rejection to the exact same extent that he’ll be uncomprehending of the its true effect on John’s confidence. 

He can see Mike’s eyes scanning back and forth down the page. He knows exactly what he’s reading, because the impersonal, fill-in-the-blanks letter feels burned into his skull: 

_Dr. John Watson,_

_Thank you for your application to the medical division of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces of the United Kingdom._

_Your application has been rejected at the following stage of the process:_

_\- Psychological Evaluation_

_For the following reason:_

_\- Alpha-typical aggressive tendencies above mandatory threshold_

_We thank you for your application and commitment to the continued security of the United Kingdom._

There’s a Major’s illegible scrawl of a signature on the bottom, and that’s it. John’s dream, down the toilet with one piece of paper. 

“Wow,” says Mike softly, in the hesitant tone of someone who is trying to figure out how to express sympathy for a situation that they have never and will never find themselves in. “That’s… bloody awful.” 

John’s beer arrives and he takes a gulp, then leans his elbows forward on the table and rubs at his eyes. It isn’t Mike’s fault, after all-- John should at least try to be gracious and good company. Even if at the moment, all he wants to do is pound the table and shout about the unfairness of the world. _Or maybe that’s just those alpha-typical aggressive tendencies showing,_ his treacherous mind whispers to him. 

“Yeah,” he sighs, managing to meet Mike’s eyes for the first time. “Yeah, it does. And I thought I was doing fine on the psych eval, honestly.” 

Mike shakes his head. “I’ve heard of this happening a lot, though, John. It’s just flat-out discrimination. Ever since that one friendly fire incident with the alpha mechanic--” John rolls his eyes at the idea that Mike would need to remind him of the single most unpleasant news item of the year for him-- “they’ve been hardly letting any alphas into the non-combative professions, I’ve heard.”

John laughs brokenly. “Yeah. As I was reminded every step of the process. Seemed like every single fucking official and evaluator just wanted to ask, don’t you think you’d be happier in the infantry? That is a profession much better suited to the alpha personality! Yeah, because that’s what I went to medical school for. Assholes.”

Mike just nods, at a loss for comfort, because there is no comfort. He’s heard John talk about a future in the armed forces ever since they met over a shared cadaver their first week of school. John could almost feel sorry for him, if he weren’t so busy feeling sorry for himself. If he were in Mike’s position, he would have no idea what to say either. 

With a mental shove, he tries to put the hurt aside. He didn’t come out just to wallow all night long; he could have done that just as easily at home. Instead, he drains his beer a little more and forces a grin. “Well,” he says as cheerfully as he can manage, “that’s that, anyway. Now you know. Guess I gotta move on to the next thing.”

“Yeah,” says Mike, tentatively grabbing on to this new foothod in the conversation, “any, um, ideas? You’re brilliant, you know. You’d have a great career in a clinic or hospital. The A&E suited you, didn’t it? Fast paced, high stakes. You like that stuff. You’re good at it.” 

“I am,” growls John, and Mike winces. 

“Well,” says Mike, “There are other avenues. Lots of organizations travel and need doctors. If you want to see the world, it doesn’t need to be from the back of a tank.”

It should be a genuinely helpful thought, but John is too tired and sad to see it as such. “Yeah,” he says sarcastically. “Maybe I should just run off with the circus.”

He expects Mike to retract at the near-insult, but… he doesn’t. Instead, he gets a curious gleam in his eye. 

“So… what, are you applying to that thing?”

“What thing?” 

“It was up on the poster board in the main foyer the other day. Some circus company is looking for a doctor. I thought that’s what you were referring to.”

“Oh,” says John, momentarily disoriented. “No. I wasn’t.” 

“Well, I’ll take a picture of it for you. Could be up your alley.”

John privately thinks that starting up at a circus immediately after being rejected by the Forces is a surefire way to get him made fun of in medical circles for approximately the next millennium, but instead he just shrugs. “Sure,” he admits. “Could be worth a try.”

***

The tent is pretty much exactly what John expected. He stares out of the window of the cab carrying him to Cirque Cherep’s home performance and training space. It’s huge. He hadn’t expected to be all that impressed by a circus tent. But there’s something about it that sets it on a different level from the towering stone of London. It’s otherworldly. 

“Main entrance, yeah?” says the cab driver, and John nods, then says “yes” when it occurs to him that the cab driver can’t actually see him from the front of the vehicle. He pulls out his mobile, just to check one more time. Sally Donovan, whose email identifies her only as “secretary@cirquecherep.com,” has indeed sent him a terse confirmation that she would meet him at the main entrance to the complex and show him around at 5:30 PM sharp. 

Sally Donovan turns out to be a sturdy, no-nonsense alpha with her frizzy mop of hair pulled back into a utilitarian ponytail. John appraises her; traces of above-average musculature visible through her trousers and blazer indicate that she may have had a past on the non-administrative side of the troupe, but John can’t be sure. 

This is not how he had imagined starting his medical career, admittedly. 

“This is our main centre of operations,” Sally is saying briskly. “When we travel, it’s all broken down and set up in each new city. When we’re home, it’s a training hall, and undergoes any necessary repairs. Your office will always be in here. It’s the first room off of stage right.” She’s leading him through a dizzying maze of hallways, some distinctly tent-like and some resembling the inside of an actual building. 

Suddenly, he finds himself following her through a narrow corridor that sweeps out into the main performance hall of the tent. It’s lit in bright white light, throwing into relief the intricate systems of wires and pulleys set up all around the space. 

He and Sally are alone in the hall amidst a vast amount of, well, stuff, most of which John couldn’t identify for the life of him. He suspects he will become very familiar with everything in this room as he starts treating complaints caused by mishaps on each piece. 

“It’s dinner hour at the moment,” Sally explains, “Starts at five-thirty. Acrobats like an early dinner. There’s no official training after supper, but most come here anyway to work on their own. This is you.” 

They had exited out the corridor on the other side of the hall, and Sally is holding out a key to John. Sure enough, the door is locked, and he opens the door with the proffered key to reveal a small but otherwise fairly standard-looking clinic room. 

This is it; this is his space. He steps in, not minding Sally’s appraising gaze. She smells bonded, which alleviates the tension inherent in having two alphas alone in a small room together, even of different primary genders. John is glad of it; he hasn’t exactly been feeling charitable towards his secondary gender recently. 

He’ll get the chance to come back after dinner and set things up the way he wants them. Technically, his contract doesn’t start until the 1st of September; John has two whole days to get the lay of the land before the acrobats are officially supposed to start showing up at his office with complaints. Practically, though, John has doubts; the previous troupe doctor’s contract ended a month and a half ago, and there’s no reason that the performers would know or care to leave him alone until he’s on the clock. 

He doesn’t mind. It will be nice to have something to do. Finally. 

He turns, and realizes that Sally is closing the door. She steps towards him, and sighs a little. 

“Look, John,” she says. She seems to be searching for words. He occupies himself by glancing around the room; patient table, computer desk, space for files, drawers presumably full of supplies. 

“I’m Lev Solomin’s personal secretary,” she says, “And as such, I help him with… many things. Including personnel decisions. I read your file. I helped make the decision to hire you.”

John isn’t sure what reaction she’s expecting to that information, so he just nods and says, “Thank you for the opportunity.”

“I, um…” she stammers, casting her eyes around anywhere but him. “I just wanted you to know. We have the file from the Forces. And I want you to know it stays with us-- with Lev and I, that is-- and we don’t hold it against you.”

“Thanks,” says John slowly. He turns over this piece of information, and it occurs to him that he actually hadn’t thought to check whether his eval record with the Forces was private or not. So either it isn’t, or this Lev Solomin character has significant connections beyond just owning a circus. In all honesty, both are equally likely, and it isn’t worth worrying about at this point. Still, it burrows irritatingly into the back of his mind. 

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks. 

Sally shrugs. “Dunno, alpha solidarity, I guess? And because… I used to be in the acrobatic corps, before I presented. They can get weird about gender. I just wanted to let you know we have your back, Lev and I.”

The unexpected admission thrums at John’s chest. If Sally was an acrobat before she presented, then it must have been the presentation that forced her out. He had known from doing a bit of research on his new job that most professional acrobats are betas, but he’d figured it was just probability, accentuated by the inconvenience that participating in a heat cycle would have for someone who relied on their body’s reliability for their work. 60% of the population are betas, after all, so a preponderance of betas in a specific profession doesn’t necessarily spell discrimination right away. 

What Sally is saying, though, does paint a specific picture. And she’s right-- it’s good for him to know about it before he starts meeting his patients. 

“Thanks,” he says simply, meeting her clear brown eyes. 

She nods, all business. “I’ll show you back to the cab, then,” she says. “Our hotel is only about a five-minute drive, and the troupe rents out several floors for the time we’re here. You can just give your name at the desk and you’ll be shown your room.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to all Alexanders for stealing your diminutive. It was for a needy case ;)

The hotel is a mid-price chain, from the outside just a grey tower of balconies. John’s room is on the ninth floor, and he’s pleasantly surprised that although the troupe serves meals for all employees in one of the hotel ballrooms, he also has a well-stocked kitchenette in his own space. 

It’s 6:15, and most of John’s intelligent mind is telling him that he should go down to dinner and introduce himself to his new colleagues. The larger part, though, wants to eat a granola bar in his room and hide from the almost-overwhelming weirdness of the whole thing. A few weeks ago, he thought he knew where he was going to end up. He’d done his research on the Forces; he knew what to expect, what kind of people he’d be working with, and how to behave around them. Now, he has no idea. 

He lies back on the bed. He will go down to dinner, soon. He just needs a moment. 

Closing his eyes, he allows himself to take in the scents of the hotel. Usually, hotels are full of the overpowering scent of omegas in heat-- many prefer to hide away for heats, whether alone or with a partner, and like the anonymity of a hotel room over a block of flats or residential street where nosy neighbors will be wondering if they’ve gotten themselves knocked up this time. This hotel is better than most on that front, though-- the fact that fully six floors are occupied by Cirque Cherep probably helps, if Sally’s warning about the reasons behind beta dominance in the circus arts is accurate. The inoffensive, background scent of betas pervades the place, and John feels a little prickle of anxiety at the idea of standing out so much.

He reaches out further and identifies traces of alpha and omega in a few rooms, pulling on his senses. It should be irritating--usually is-- but for the first time in his life, the scent of rival alphas around is actually calming. John lets himself relax for the first time all day--

\--and wakes up in the pitch black. Shit. How long has he been asleep? He grabs for his mobile from where he had dropped it on top of his unpacked suitcase. 1:13 in the morning. _Shit._ He had basically just had a full nights’ sleep, beginning at dinnertime. He could try to go back to sleep now, but it was unlikely to last for much longer, and he’s going to be a wreck for his first real day of meeting his new colleagues. 

He glances out the window. For a moment he’s not sure why he suddenly needed to check out the window, but-- there. There it is again. A shadow, just a hint of movement, on his balcony. Probably just a bird or something, but since he hadn’t been planning on sleeping, he hadn’t closed the blinds. 

John’s feet feel pinched in the shoes he neglected to take off as he crosses the room to the balcony door. He stares out the window, trying to make out the miasmatic light of London in the distance, from the hotel’s position in what amounts to a suburban wasteland. He’s so focused on the lights of the city that he almost-- _almost_ \-- misses the fact that there is a pair of feet dangling in front of his eyes. 

For a moment John freezes, squinting. Yes. He can just make out the outline of a pair of long, thin legs dangling down from the balcony above his, and a pair of curved, rubber-toed shoes on the feet. 

The next moment, without any conscious thought having passed through his mind, John is out on the balcony, the cool night air on his face and two bony ankles grasped firmly between his hands. 

“Were you trying to go up or down?” he hears himself say. 

He can’t exactly see the face of the person whose weight he is half-holding, but he catches a glimpse of a mop of black curls pulled back with a wide elastic band from the owner’s pale face before a deep baritone voice says, “I was planning on up, as I would think is obvious. But you’re making it rather difficult.”

The man he’s just caught _scaling his fucking balcony_ kicks his legs a little, trying to wiggle free. John doesn’t let go. He notices that the shoes the man is wearing are very tight, made of canvas in the centre and rubber at the toe, and fastened with velcro. They’re obviously made specifically for climbing, John realizes. So this wasn’t some random lark; this man dressed specifically to climb hotel balconies. 

“Actually,” he says, “I think I’d rather prefer you come down. I’ve got some questions for you involving your intentions, see.” 

The kicking legs go still, and he hears a put-upon sign from above him. “I can hang onto this railing for a very long time, you know.”

John tightens his grip. “I’m willing to bet that however long you can hang from a railing, I can stand here holding your ankles for longer.”

A small silence. “Likely,” the man admits. “But if you simply wait for my arms to give out, and you’re still holding my legs when that happens, my head or torso will hit the railing of the balcony you’re standing on before you can pull me in fully.” 

John has to laugh at that. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah, that could happen. Only, I’m the one who apprehended a crime in progress, and you’re, as far as I can tell, a particularly irritating and agile burglar. So I’m going to leave the decision up to you, as to how you think this is going to play out best for you.”

Another silence. He sees a small shift and the man’s face comes fully into view as he peers down at John. He’s wiry to the point of being nearly gaunt, the hollows of his cheeks standing out in the pale ambient light of streetlights below. 

“Put my feet on the railings of your balcony,” he says. 

John hesitates, and he feels more than sees the eyeroll from above. “You can keep hold of my ankles if you want,” he adds, and John finally shifts a little to place the curved rubber soles of the shoes in the middle of the railing. He does keep one hand on the man’s ankle, but lets one hand slide up to hover behind his back, guarding him against the fall-- it is, after all, a rather long way down. 

He needn’t have worried; the figure drops down and launches himself forward, landing rather gracefully on John’s balcony. 

The man draws up to his full height and John sees that he is at least a head taller than him, and dressed entirely in black spandex. Combined with his rather excessive leanness, the overall effect is that of a spider in vaguely human form. 

John should maybe feel intimidated by the fact that he has a suspected criminal on his balcony, looking him up and down like _he’s_ the one under suspicion, but he doesn’t. Curious, mainly. The intruder gives off the fresh, young scent of an unpresented secondary gender, but he looks far too old to have not presented-- in his twenties, probably. 

“Well?” says the man. “You’ve had a good look at me. What do you think?”

John’s heart thuds. “Excuse me?”

He shrugs. “Am I a burglar?”

John’s never seen it happen with someone quite this old before, but then, he’s never been a doctor to high-performing acrobats, either. It’s common for intense athletic training to delay both puberty of the primary gender, and secondary gender presentation. 

“You’re with Cherep, clearly,” admits John. “That doesn’t actually explain why you were scaling balconies.”

The man shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says. 

“So… you decided to climb the building,” John says skeptically. 

“The training hall was closed.”

“You’re serious.”

“Of course.”

John sighs. “Okay, well, if that’s true then you’re an absolute nutter, but since you’re the kind of nutter who entertains himself with distinctly life-and-limb threatening activities, I guess I’m going to have to get to know you sooner or later. I’m John Watson.”

“Sherlock Holmes.” He extends his hand, long and bony, and shakes John’s hand with a firmness that is, given the grip strength he’s just demonstrated, entirely expected. “You’re the new doctor, then. I suppose I’ll be a great bother to you, especially since this clearly wasn’t your first choice of post-medical-school job.”

Sherlock’s face is calm, but John feels like he’s been punched in the gut. “Um. Well. Most doctors don’t imagine they’re going to join a circus, to be honest. So. No offense to you or your work, anyway.”

“None taken,” says Sherlock easily. “So, are you going to let me go, or what?” He’s leaning back with his palms on the railing, elbows in the air in the air casually. 

“I’m your doctor, not your nanny,” says John. He pulls the door to his hotel suite open again, stepping through and then to the side to allow Sherlock to follow him in. 

He doesn’t. John realizes he’s alone in the room, then glances back outside to see that _shit, fuck,_ Sherlock is back up on the railing and preparing to haul himself up onto the next balcony. He leaps back outside. 

“ _Jesus!_ ” he hisses. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He makes to grab Sherlock’s feet again, but he’s too slow; this time, Sherlock bends his knees to keep them out of John’s reach and then grasps two of the poles on the railing of the balcony above and pulls himself up them, hand-over-hand, until he can throw his legs entirely over to stand on the next balcony.

The pale face leans over the railing, grinning down at John. “It’s a rush,” he says. “You should try it.”

“I’ll try it, all right,” John snarls, “to come up there and… I don’t know, box your fucking ears or something. That is _not what I meant_ when I said I would let you go.”

“Too late now,” Sherlock sing-songs, and John can hear the rustle as he carefully begins positioning himself on top of the next railing, preparing to grab onto the underside of the balcony above. 

“Get--” John looks wildly around, not sure what he’s looking for or what he would do once he finds it, but the only objects on the balcony are a single plastic chair and a few small rocks. If an acrobat falls to his death right in front of him, John is really not sure what he would do. How could he return to a career of any kind after something like that? “I’m calling hotel security,” he calls up.

“Sounds fun,” says Sherlock, his voice a little strained from the effort of whatever the fuck stage of the process he has reached by now. “I’d love to see them try this.”

Enraging. That’s what this man is. And John _is_ enraged, the kind of anger that goes against all rational thought. This is his first fucking day-- well, night-- of work. He’s graduated medical school, for crying out loud. He was going to be an army doctor. He is prepared for a whole damn lot of situations. But a nutter in spandex and climbing shoes risking his life on his hotel room balcony is not one of them. 

Before he’s really thought through what he’s doing, John’s picked up a rock and thrown it at Sherlock. It’s not a large rock, and he doesn’t throw it hard enough to injure-- he thinks-- but the moment he hears the small thud of impact and a little surprised yelp from above him, he feels a shock of horror.

 _Jesus Christ, what have I done._ The team doctor has just thrown a fucking rock at one of his patients. On his first day. _Way to go, Watson._ He watches numbly as the thing tumbles its way down the side of the building and land in a bush. 

He hears another soft impact from above him, and has a moment of panic that perhaps he cause Sherlock to fall entirely, before his face reappears peering over the balcony. He looks utterly bemused, a small smile playing at his lips. “Did you just--”

“I’m sorry,” John whispers urgently. “That was-- shit, I’m an idiot. I’m so sorry. I have a fucking problem. I can’t believe I just did that.”

Sherlock just stares down at him, like he’s suddenly really looking at John for the first time. “So that’s how you ended up here,” he says, apparently apropos nothing at all, but John gets a strange prickly feeling in his neck. That _is_ kind of how he had ended up here. The Forces had seen it in him, somehow, reached into his psyche and divined that he was too much in thrall to his alpha impulses, and would do boneheaded things like _this._ There is no way for Sherlock to know that, of course. The fact that he appears to have guessed something similar must merely be an illusion. 

He’s about to respond, when the door on the balcony above clicks open. Sherlock’s head disappears, and then John hears a man’s voice with a thick Russian accent: “Shura, are you fucking with me?”

Sherlock’s been caught. John feels a rush of fear, before he realizes that this is a good thing, it’s exactly what he wanted-- someone with, by the sounds of it, more authority than John, dragging him inside and setting him straight. He’s about to sneak quietly back into his own room when he hears Sherlock huffing, “Well, I would have made it if I haven’t had a rock thrown at me,” and sees a slightly tanned, stubbled face with sleep-mussed grey hair poke out over the balcony. Instinctively John inhales; the new arrival is a beta, his scent comfortable yet powerful. 

“Um, hi,” says John. 

“He tells the truth? You threw a rock at my Shura?”

“Uh… I…” John sighs. “It wasn’t my finest hour.”

“Then you are in trouble too.” The man favours him with a look that’s almost cheerful, and Sherlock’s head appears over the railing abruptly-- he’s been pulled there, the Russian man holding him with a firm hand on his elbow. “You are both in very deep shit,” he announces, and then laughs a little. He confers inaudibly with Sherlock, then calls back down, “Ivan, you will meet us in the hallway outside of my room. You can do that, yes?”

“Uh… yeah,” John says, butterflies in his stomach. He takes a deep breath, stopping in front of the mirror as he crosses the room. He’s still dressed, which is a little bit of a blessing-- if he’s going to get fired before he even starts, at least he won’t be doing it in his pyjamas. 

He locks the door, pocketing the key as well as his mobile, then leans against the wall in the harsh hotel lighting, and tries to collect himself. So. He’s going to get fired. Well, at least he hasn’t invested too much in this job. He can go back to London, get an ER position. There’s a good tradition of hiring alphas in the ER; as a result it’s a smelly, tense place to be, but he will at least feel at home. He can do good work there, and Mike was right; he does like the pace, and he’s good at the work. Maybe he should have done that in the first place. Well, at least this will make for an interesting story. One day. 

He sees Sherlock and his captor rounding the corner. He hardly looks like he’s in trouble; the older man still has a hand on his elbow, but it’s more a familiar gesture than a threatening one. Sherlock is smiling, laughing a little at something the man has just said. When he sees John, he gestures theatrically towards him. “Grisha, this is John. He’s our new doctor. He threw a rock at me in a fit of anger after catching me scaling his balcony. John, this is Grigory Leskov. He’s the head acrobatic trainer of Cirque Cherep.”

Grigory lets go of Sherlock’s arm to clap John on the back. “Vanya,” he says bracingly, “My friend, you have almost as great a talent for getting in trouble as my Shura does. You’ll have the honour of meeting Lev on your first night, imagine that.” He slings an arm around John’s shoulders, regrasps Sherlock’s elbow, and starts pulling the both of them towards the elevator. 

“Uh,” stammers John, “That’s Lev… Solomin? He’s what, the CEO? Can we… look, I fucked up, I know I did, but isn’t he asleep?”

“Unlikely,” puts in Sherlock, keeping pace beside Grigory. He seems for all the world entirely relaxed. “It’s a lucky thing we didn’t do this at three in the afternoon. Now, then we’d really be in for it.”

“Shura is right,” says Grigory. “He is awake always at this hour. I, however, am not.” He looks significantly at Sherlock. “And I find my appetite for watching straddle rope climbs to be greatly enhanced by a lack of sleep.”

Sherlock shuffles his feet a little, pulling a face. The elevator dings, and they exit into what John realizes is the penthouse suite of the hotel. 

Lev Solomin is a sturdy alpha with a small grey moustache. He’s sitting at a desk in the study, and when Grigory pushes the two of them into the room without warning and then enters more sedately after them, Lev only looks up, eyebrows raised, at the two miscreants and their captor. 

Grigory tells the whole tale from his perspective- being roused from sleep by the sound of Sherlock and John arguing, seeing Sherlock clamber up onto his balcony and then reach for the next, and the impact of a rock thrown from below on the small of his back. Lev listens to the tale impassively, stroking his forehead in thought. Sherlock leans his back against the edge of the TV stand; John just stands, arms crossed behind his back, wondering if things would have ended this same way even if he had been accepted to the Forces. Perhaps this is just who he is. 

When Grigory finishes talking, Lev makes a little grunting sound and pulls himself to his feet. He stalks over to stand in front of Sherlock. “So, Sherlock still gets bored,” he says. It isn’t a question. Sherlock just shrugs, seeming uncomfortable for the first time in the proceedings. “You do what else, for this boredom?”

“No,” says Sherlock sharply, and John is momentarily flabbergasted that he’s choosing to be rude at this particular moment, but Lev doesn’t seem offended. His face gentles, in fact, and he just nods and says “Good.” Then he stalks towards John. 

He’s standing very close; closer than any alpha would willingly choose to stand to another without it being a power play. It’s a rather ridiculous one; John is the one who’s been dragged before Lev for some kind of judgement. He doesn’t stand a chance. Still, some insane, proud part of him forces his chin up and his eyes level with Lev’s, and he raises his eyebrows slightly, a challenge. 

The moment stretches between them, and John is about to snap, give in and cast his eyes back down and apologize, when Lev suddenly bursts into laughter. He turns to Sherlock, and, grinning widely at him, says “Sherlock, my boy, you’ve found one to match you, I think. Stick close to him.” He chuckles a little bit more, throwing himself back down behind his desk. “Well, you’ll have to, anyway,” he says, “Because the two of you will be washing dishes together after every meal for the next week. Grisha, thank you for introducing me, it was very entertaining.”

It’s an obvious dismissal. John sees Grigory’s mouth twist, partway between his own amusement and annoyance-- at the punishment? Is it too light, or too harsh? Or at the crime he apprehended crime being laughed off? 

He doesn’t have time to wonder, because he’s being hustled out of the room and he and the three of them are in the elevator again, on their way back down. Sherlock looks genuinely put out as he sighs and scowls at John. “Now look what you’ve done,” he says. “I’m going to miss trampoline warmup this entire week.”

“Well, you should have thought of that before you decided to pull your little stunt tonight,” John says, deliberately forcing himself to abstain from asking what trampoline warmup entails and whether Sherlock is glad or sorry to be missing it. 

“Shush, boys,” commands Grigory just as Sherlock opens his mouth to retort. “Bicker later. Sleep now.” The elevator dings on Grigory’s floor, and he steps out. John is left alone in the elevator with Sherlock, wondering why he’s absolutely sure that they’re both going to obey the order for no other reason than that Grigory gave it. 

The elevator stops the next floor down. “Well,” says John lamely, “See you tomorrow.”

Sherlock doesn’t respond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang out w/me on dreamwidth? :D http://tei.dreamwidth.org/


	3. Chapter 3

John manages a few more fitful hours of sleep before his alarm wakes him to start the day in earnest. He eats breakfast alone, as pretty much everyone seems to do-- apparently circus folk aren’t chatty types in the morning. About half the people at breakfast are clad in the carefully casual attire of serious athletes who haven’t yet started their training for the day: pyjama pants thrown on over leotards, oversized hoodies, leg warmers. Some have small rubber balls with them, which they roll absent-mindedly against the muscles of their hands and forearms as they eat. 

He doesn’t notice Sherlock until the meal is wrapping up. He appears as if out of nowhere, wearing a black sleeveless leotard with sweatpants and a ratty backpack slung over his shoulder. In the daytime, he looks no less ethereal and angular than he had on the balcony in the darkness; in a room full of fairly diminutive acrobats, he appears to tower above everyone else. He doesn’t offer any sort of conventional greeting, just says “kitchen is through here,” and leads John out the side door of the hotel convention room where Cirque Cherep’s meals are served and into a no-nonsense catering kitchen. 

Pete, the head chef, is an omega. He’s bonded, with the powerfully grounding scent of an omega whose job is to rule with an iron fist over a sort of scaled-up version of the traditional hearth-and-home realm traditional to his gender. He immediately guides John and Sherlock to the corner of the kitchen, where all of the dishes from breakfast are piled in plastic bins. 

“You boys misbehaved at the right time for me-- my staff will be glad to get off a little early from meals this week,” he grins, his voice gentle. “Fill the left basin with soap and water, the right with sanitizer water. One person washes and dumps ‘em in the sanitizer basin, the other pulls ‘em out and puts them back in the cupboards. Got it?”

“I think we can manage,” says Sherlock, clearly trying for acerbic, but it’s somehow impossible to show sharp edges in Pete’s presence; he’s the human equivalent of a warm bath. Sherlock positions himself on the left, and John picks up a towel. 

“So… Lev didn’t seem too angry,” John ventures, after a few minutes of drying and replacing dishes. Sherlock hasn’t looked at him yet, his face bent over the wash basin as he scrubs at plates and cups. 

“You were worried you were going to lose your job,” Sherlock says, glancing at John out of the corner of his eye. “Or… maybe you were hoping you would lose your job.”

John takes a deep breath. “You know that’s kinda creepy, right?” he says. “Most people wait until that kind of information is offered, even if they suspect it.” 

“Hmm,” says Sherlock, as if this is simply neutral information that has nothing to do with him personally. 

John rolls his eyes. “Clearly, though, you’re not most people,” he admits. 

“Not really, no.” 

John grabs a few handful of teacups at the same time and replaces them in the cabinet. He wants to get through this so he can go put his office in order; there’s going to be an announcement about him going out soon to the acrobatic corps, but word is probably going to get out today anyway, so we wants to be ready to see patients as soon as possible. That’s what he should be concentrating on right now. 

Still, Sherlock is probably the main channel by which word is going to get out, at the moment, and John doesn’t want him telling his colleagues that their new doctor doesn’t want to be there. It’s not even true, really. At least, John is beginning to suspect it might not be true soon. Maybe. 

“I don’t want to lose this job, no,” he sighs. “But yeah, you’re right, it wasn’t my first choice. I applied to the Forces. I wasn’t accepted. So now I’m here. It’s not what I expected, but life’s like that. I’m looking forward to working with you and your colleagues.”

Sherlock completely ignores the last bit of John’s little speech, his grey eyes razor-focused on John’s face as soon as he mentions the Forces. “You failed your psych eval,” he says, his voice low enough that none of the kitchen workers cleaning their stations around them can hear. 

John feels his fists clench without his conscious input. Sherlock isn’t supposed to _know_ that. “Fuck you,” he hisses, equally quietly. 

Sherlock’s gaze is calculating, taking all of him in, and John finds himself holding it for an uncomfortable length of time. Finally, Sherlock looks down, and deliberately deposits the last batch of soapy plates in John’s basin. “I don’t hold it against you,” he says. 

John licks suddenly dry lips. “Okay,” is all he can think of to say. Sherlock hasn’t apologized for pulling confidences from John that he hadn’t meant to share, and John hasn’t apologized for swearing at him. Come to think of it, Sherlock hasn’t apologized for trespassing on his balcony in the middle of the night, and John hasn’t apologized for throwing a rock at him. Somehow, though, it feels like both subjects are closed. 

John relaxes, drying the last batch of plates. Sherlock is wiping his hands on a towel. “Gotta go,” he says, and seems to make for the door. Then, he turns back, his mouth curved in a slight smile as he rolls his eyes: “Grigory assures me I have an abundance of rope climbs to do for him before I can move on to my apparatuses this morning.” 

 

The tent is walkable from the hotel, even though the troupe has a shuttle that usually takes the acrobats back and forth for training. John elects to walk the fifteen minutes, feeling the need for some fresh air before he buries himself in his office. 

When he arrives at the tent, he manages to figure out the backstage area enough to get to his office without walking through the main training hall. He can catch glimpses of the hall through the open doors; upbeat music blares from the speakers, seemingly for entertainment and not related to any particular act in the show. About thirty people are gathered on a blue sprung training floor in the centre, executing synchronized kicks that seem to be some sort of warm-up. John feels unaccountably nervous, and doesn’t venture in. He will soon, he promises himself. 

He spends the morning going through patient files that are kept in his office. It’s partway between preparation and entertainment; the active files are full of fascinating but relatively predictable ailments; knees, shoulders, ankles and elbows that just can’t keep up with the demands placed on them. 

John knows that reading a patient’s extended records out of sheer curiosity isn’t, well, great. But… fuck it, he’s alone in his office, and he _is_ justified in learning about the typical medical history of a serious acrobat. And, well, he wants to. So he flips through the files of current employees until he locates the full medical records of one Sherlock Holmes, male, unpresented secondary gender, 22 years old. 

He starts at the beginning, and his eyebrows immediately shoot straight into his hairline. 

Sherlock’s medical records _from a Cirque Cherep doctor_ start when he was six years old. 

John flips through the slightly yellowing papers. Immunization records. A tetanus shot when he was eight. A serious bout of the flu at eleven. Fucking ear infections, ear infections that _children_ get regularly because they’re fucking _children_ and why the buggering fuck was Sherlock being taken care of by a circus doctor at that age?

John’s heard of kids running away to join the circus, of course. Or being sold to a circus. As a concept. As a general cultural trope. As a thing that maybe happened two hundred years ago. Not as a real reason for an actual child to be working for a professional circus organization starting at-- well, the first note involving the date at which Sherlock was permitted to return to performance following an injury was when he was eight years old, so at least by then. And John is hard-pressed to figure out any other reason for it. Even if his parents were members, that didn’t explain why they would let their child train acrobatics, apparently, full-time, in lieu of sending him to actual fucking school. And, unusually for childrens’ medical records, there are no mentions of parents whatsoever.

John closes the file, finding himself breathing a little hard. He doesn’t know whether or not to be outraged on Sherlock’s behalf; but he is, unavoidably, _curious._ He wants to see the man again, scrutinize him in the light of this new, baffling information. John suddenly finds himself rather looking forward to lunch. 

At that moment, a mousy brunette beta pokes her head in to ask John for ice. As a first task of his new job, it’s not exactly absorbing, but he fetches her an ice pack and administers a few manual manipulations to the ankle she’s just twisted. “It’ll be fine in a few minutes,” she tells him off-handedly. “It gets twisted so often it just kinda, uh, bounces back.” John checks her file anyway, noting that Molly Hooper has indeed sprained her left ankle three times in the past year, and presumably been in for ice for twists and ongoing pain near-constantly. 

“I’m a tumbler, mostly,” she explains brightly. “It’s just part of the job.” John is skeptical that she’s going to be walking comfortably again after only a bit of ice and some manipulation, but Molly’s prediction turns out to be correct, and soon enough she’s standing cautiously, then bouncing carefully on her toes on the hard floor. “Feels good,” she says to John’s skeptical eyebrows. “Thanks, doc. See you soon!” With that, John’s first official patient hurries out the door and back to training. 

The rest of the morning, he forces himself to turn back to the most recent files, making notes on the patients he’s likely to see in the next few days. He’s absorbed enough in the work that by the time it’s time to go to lunch, he’s almost forgotten that he hasn’t decided what to say to Sherlock.

John finds himself back at the wash basin-- they’ve apparently silently agreed to trade off positions-- with a brain that feels like it’s jittering around in his skull with curiosity, and absolutely no idea how to bring up Sherlock’s past. 

He stares into the basin silently for a while. Sherlock is shooting him furtive glances every so often, his irritatingly accurate perception apparently sensing that John wants to say something to him. 

Finally, his voice sounding brittle, John forces out, “So how did you join the circus, anyway?”

Sherlock is standing in front of the cupboard, about to replace an alarmingly tippy stack of bowls. He freezes for a millisecond, which John only notices because he feels like all of his senses are tuned into Sherlock at the moment. Then he carefully places the bowls in the cupboard, and turns around to face John. 

_He knows,_ thinks John, feeling a little nauseous. Sherlock knows that John looked through his files, and he knows it was out of pure curiosity, and he knows what John found. Oh, and Sherlock _also_ knows that John has a temper, and that it prevented him from joining the Forces. Sherlock showed up on his balcony twelve hours ago, and already John has no secrets from him. 

He isn’t saying anything, just looking at John a little bit curiously. Finally, with a calculatedly casual expression, he simply says, “I came to see Cirque Cherep, and I liked it. So I joined up.”

John nods slowly. He’s already fucked up enough, where Sherlock is concerned, and somehow Sherlock doesn’t seem to hate him. He has no desire to push his luck by forcing something out of him that he doesn’t want to talk about.

Sherlock grabs his bag from where he’s dumped it in the corner of the kitchen, getting ready to go to afternoon training. John takes a deep breath, kicking himself internally, and is about to steel himself to go back to his office and organize more files when Sherlock says, “come watch us train tomorrow.”

John’s head snaps up. “Hmm?”

“Tomorrow,” says Sherlock. “Don’t come this afternoon, it’s just conditioning and ballet. Boring. But come tomorrow. I’m working on a new corde lisse act, you’ll get to see me with rope burns all over my body. And I need to fill in for our usual trapeze act for the next month or so, so I’ll be training that. It’s not my favourite, but people seem to like it. And if I’m lucky--” he rolls his eyes slightly as he says it-- “Grigory will let me work on my Wheel of Death act in the afternoon. I’m the best in Europe-- the only one, actually, except when a touring show comes through.”

John blinks. “The-- what?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “They just call it that. Well, some people did die doing it. But I probably won’t. It takes some setup, so I might have to stay after training. Come see for yourself.”

It occurs to John that this is the most earnestly he’s ever heard Sherlock talk. He seems more animated, somehow just a little bit more alive and sparking with energy, when he’s talking about his training. 

John doesn’t want it to end. “So, when you say the best in Europe…?”

Sherlock grimaces. “I wouldn’t be the best in South America, but that’s about it.”

It somehow isn’t surprising that Sherlock is the kind of person for whom the idea of there being a continent on the planet where he isn’t the best at what he does is painful. Talking about his work has done something remarkable to the rather vain acrobat, though. He’s faintly glowing. It’s remarkable, like he has an “on” button John has just pushed. He must have been aglow like this last night, too-- John had just been a little too distracted to notice. 

“Yeah,” says John, “okay, yeah, I should come see a practice. Tomorrow is my last day before I’m officially on call, too. I’ll come.”

Afternoon training features a few more acrobats coming in for ice and ankle wraps, which John discovers quickly they’re very particular about-- the taping job that one insists on will elicit eye rolls and barked directions from another, and John spends a lot of time sitting on a footstool bemusedly wondering why they don’t just wrap their own damn ankles. 

When he asks Sherlock the question over the dinner dishes, he answers readily with a smile, “We do. They just wanted to meet you. Can you blame them?” 

That night, John falls asleep readily, undisturbed by night-time visitors, and excited for the day ahead.


	4. Chapter 4

When John walks into the training hall the next morning, the first thing he notices is the sound. He’s seen the circus before; not recently or often, but he has vague memories of acrobats in tight, brightly-coloured costumes sailing through the air to music. The scene that greets him in the hall is nothing like the slick performance that is its aim. 

All of the acrobats seem to be shouting something at each other. It takes John a moment to tease the wall of sound out into individual sounds that have meaning. A young woman stands, posture casual but voice booming as she shouts “comeoncomeONCOME-- YEAH, NICE, ASHLEY!” at a colleague launching herself into a tumbling run. Most of the shouting seems to be some variation on that theme; John hears several people shouting “devaidevaiDEVAIDEVAI!” in more or less the same tone of voice, and makes the inference of a similar sentiment in Russian. 

On the corner of the sprung floor, a group of people are gathered, apparently casually, in positions that John would readily assume can’t be comfortable if it weren’t for the fact that they seem quite relaxed indeed. Most have one leg up on a tall, square mat, while one has his hands up on the mat and is hanging off of his shoulder joints in a way that makes John wince. “Yikes,” he mutters to himself, and looks around for a suitable vantage place from which to observe the goings-on. 

It takes him a moment to spot Sherlock, because he’s closer to the ceiling than he is the ground; on the far corner of the hall, above a generous square of matting, there are an array of brightly-coloured silks and two thick white ropes. Sherlock is on one of the ropes, and has the tail of it knotted around his torso in a way that looks more like he’s been captured by something nasty than anything else. Then, he lets go of the thing with his hands and his head shoots towards the ground-- and John gasps momentarily before realizing that he’s been pulled into the trick of it entirely as the complicated wrapping slowly unravels. Sherlock’s long, lithe form turns over in the air several times, slowly and controlled in his descent, before the final knot catches and he ends up hanging, legs split, back arched and belly to the ceiling, nearly at the bottom of the rope. 

John forgets for a moment that the entire acrobatic corps can look over and see him standing there, mouth hanging open as he stares; he does it anyway, his eyes riveted as Sherlock holds the ending position for a moment, then casually grasps the rope and jumps to the ground. He’s breathing a little bit hard, his bare chest visibly rising and falling-- and sure enough, there are rope burns faintly visible on his sides. John wonders for a moment why doesn’t just put a shirt on to train that act, but then, most of the men in the room are bare-chested, so perhaps it simply isn’t done. John takes a deep breath. He’s lucky that almost all of the acrobats are betas, with a few alphas thrown in; the idea of being in a training hall full of sweaty, half-naked omegas and then having to carry on working as if nothing unusual were happening-- well. He would manage it, but he wouldn’t be happy about it. 

It takes him a moment to realize he’s being hailed. “Here-- over here, Vanya, you can watch him from here.” Grigory is grinning up at him from the floor of the training hall. John descends the last few steps, and sheepishly crosses over to where Grigory is standing, simultaneously watching over Sherlock on the rope, and a group of three women, two of whom are throwing the third repeatedly into the air and then catching her. The flyer executes a flip with a number of twists John would readily admit he can’t count, and she lands in the other girls’ arms. She wrinkles her nose and makes a comment which causes the rest of them to laugh a little. 

“So you came to see your Shura, like he said you would,” Grigory grins at him. 

“Uh,” says John, stammering at the linguistic implication that Sherlock has gone, in the course of a day, from being Grigory’s “ _my_ Shura” to, apparently, _John’s_ Shura. “I… came to watch Sherlock train, yeah.” 

“Good. Sit here,” says Grigory, indicating a front-row seat closest to the array of silks and ropes. “And do not speak to him. He’s only distractible when he talks about you.” With that he strides away, shouting something to a man holding a handstand on a pair of elevated wooden blocks, leaving John to wonder what on earth that’s supposed to mean to him. 

He watches for about an hour and a half before Grigory claps his hands loudly and shouts “ten minutes!” In that time, he watches Sherlock go through what seems like neverending repetitions of climbing the rope-- first with the air of his feet wrapped around it, arching his back sensuously every time he pushes his legs straight and his arms higher up the rope-- then without, with his legs apart and together, then some sort of climb involving a terrifying swing of his open legs in between each twist of the rope that somehow propels him upwards instead of downwards, like the laws of gravity simply don’t apply to Sherlock Holmes. 

Shortly before the break, Sherlock shakes out his hands and thoroughly stretches his wrists, then spends some time on one of the two large trampolines set up in the opposite corner. Though he’s farther away from John, it’s easy to make him out because of how high he’s going. He starts out simply jumping-- which John initially assumes to be easy, until a much younger and less skilled acrobat climbs onto the trampoline beside him and attempts the same, but ends up careening out of control every time she gets even half as high as Sherlock is soaring with ease all while remaining exactly in the centre of the trampoline bed. After that, John starts to watch more closely; at the way he adjusts in the air to ensure he lands in exactly the same place every time, and the way he seems to be looking at specific objects in front of him at specific points in the jump. 

John had looked up the Wheel of Death online after Sherlock had mentioned it the day before. It was, if anything, even more terrifying than the name made it sound. A human-sized hamster wheel is attached with scaffolding to a counterweight, or in some cases another wheel, the contraption taking up the entire floor-to ceiling space of a standard theatre. Walking in the wheel causes the entire structure to rotate, but in the videos-- which John had had to turn off pretty quickly-- the acrobats weren’t just walking. They were jumping, flipping, and even clambering out of the wheel and onto the scaffolding of the thing. He is left with both a strong desire to see Sherlock do _that_ , and the sincere hope that he never does it again. 

Sherlock plops down beside him as soon as Grigory calls the break. Up close, John can see that his black curls are slicked with sweat, and the rope marks on his torso stand out an angry pink on his pale skin. John has to force his eyes away from the marks, and up to Sherlock’s face. “That was amazing,” is all he can think of to say, because it’s true.

Sherlock is pleased, John can see that he is, but he hides it, just shrugging and saying “Taking it easy this morning.”

Sherlock spends the rest of the break giving John run-downs on his colleagues-- both basic information and, John suspects, some that isn’t common knowledge-- while wolfing down a banana and some chocolate milk and swinging his legs wildly from the seat. When Grigory claps his hands again and booms “Time!” he hops up and dusts off the seat of his shorts, dashing back into the hall without so much as a goodbye, but leaving John feeling rather pleased anyway. 

Instead, Grigory comes and sits beside him, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as they watch the troup quickly warm up again in preparation for their next apparatus. Before he sits down, he pauses to shout at Sherlock, “Shura! Trapeze. Now. Two full routines, please.” Sherlock rolls his eyes, huffing visibly even from where John is sitting, and starts to ascend a long ladder up to the trapeze platform. There’s a net underneath the path of the trapeze, but John still finds his heart residing somewhere in the vicinity of his voice box. God, he’s going _high. _He swallows, trying to concentrate as Grigory sits down next to him. He’s not sure what to say to this gruff, inscrutable man, especially considering not too long ago Grigory was dragging him in from of the executive director of the whole organization to be punished.__

__Which punishment, he realizes, Grigory probably knew in advance was going to involve John and Sherlock being forced into close proximity with each other. And John has absolutely no idea what to make of that either._ _

__“Trapeze,” says Grigory, “Not Shura’s favourite. I tried, many years, to try to find him a trapeze partner. He’s a very beautiful flyer, as you will see. But he knows how to make life miserable enough for a partner that they’ll refuse to work with him, if he does not have the desire for the apparatus. So: compromise. He does only solo trapeze, and in show, only when our main partner trapeze act is out. Our catcher, she has a torn labrum for the moment, so she also asks for time off to visit her family after having surgery. So, Shura needs to fill in. Lev always wants a trapeze act, every show. If main act is not available, Shura must do his.”_ _

__John nods, trying to simultaneously pay attention to what Grigory is saying and watch Sherlock, who is chalking his hands and the tops and bottoms of his feet from a bucket on top of the impossibly high platform._ _

__“So Lev likes trapeze?” he manages to force out._ _

__Grigory nods. “Lev says, every circus must have trapeze, every show. If no trapeze, no circus.” He barks out a laugh. “Lev is full of shit about that. Circus is many things. A few hundred years ago, perhaps someone would say, no dancing bears, no circus. Times change. Art change. But no matter. Lev wants trapeze, Shura will perform on trapeze.”_ _

__Sherlock has hopped onto the bar of the trapeze and is swinging, standing tall and bending his knees at the nadir of each swing to power the thing ever higher. It looks simple, but John is no longer inclined to trust what looks easy or simple in this place._ _

__Suddenly, at the front of a particularly high swing, he falls back a little, and before John has time to gasp, he is hanging upside-down instead, his flexed feet tucked into the corner where the bar meets the two ropes. At the back of that same swing, he floats back up, rising to standing on the bar again like it’s the easiest thing in the world. John boggles, then looks at Grigory. He’s frowning slightly. “Fingers, please, as you hang,” he shouts, and Sherlock does it again on the next swing, this time arcing his arms out gracefully as he hangs by his feet, extending all the way out to the graceful lines of his long, thin fingers._ _

__Grigory looks at John, laughing a little at his astonishment. “This part, he has been doing since he was a small child,” he says. “Do not worry about him, Vanya, he is only warming up.”_ _

__John doesn’t want to pry if Sherlock doesn’t want him to. He really doesn’t, or at least the intelligent, thoughtful part of him doesn’t. But Grigory has just given him an opening, and he has to ask._ _

__“So… he started… all this… as a child, then?” he says cautiously._ _

__Grigory gestures around at the room. “All of us do,” he says. “Many start in gymnastics. Shura, he came here young. I would never have thought we would take a student of that sort--but six years old, he shows up, could hold a free handstand for a full minute. I ask him where he learns it-- his bedroom, he says.”_ _

__John frowns, trying to seem casual as his heart leaps into his chest when Sherlock adds a full twist to the rise from the hanging position to the standing. “And he… lived here?”_ _

__“Ah,” says Grigory. “You mean, his family.” He pats John’s knee gently. “That, you will have to ask him about. Shura will tell you, I feel sure. But it is not for me.”_ _

__John shakes his head. “Why would he tell me?”_ _

__Grigory’s face is entirely open and honest when he turns to face John fully. “He loves you. That’s not a thing you can throw out the window like a potato.”_ _

__John manages to choke on nothing at all, cough violently, and come up a vivid shade of red when he says, “He _what?_ Um, not to… it’s just, you do realize that… _insane_ balcony incident was the first time I met him, right?”_ _

__Grigory just shrugs. “And he talks of nothing else since. Shura saw circus once, at five years old, and he knew it was for him. Next day, he started trying to do the things he saw, all alone in his room. Six months later, here he was, insisting to be allowed to show me his abilities. So: he saw you. He knew. Not so different.”_ _

___It seems pretty damn different,_ John wants to say, but instead his eyes are locked on Sherlock, who is now hanging from his hands beneath the trapeze. He floats again impossibly to hang at the knee, then twist around fully back to a seated position and repeats that cycle a few more times. It’s beautiful. John has forgotten to be scared for him; every trick seems to radiate inevitability, as if its success is a foregone conclusion, when John is aware that must be very far from the truth. _ _

__He finds he has no answer for Grigory. So he just leans back in the seat and cranes his neck up, watching._ _

__Grigory is looking at him curiously. “So simple for you then, too. You don’t even mind that Shura will be a beta.”_ _

__“He’s unpresented,” says John slowly, trying to parse out that extraordinary sentence and utterly failing._ _

__“He will be a beta,” says Grigory confidently. “Twenty-two, and unpresented? And training seriously since he was five. Impossible for him to present as alpha or omega. It would be terrible for his training. Can you imagine?”_ _

__“Um,” says John. He _is_ the team doctor, he thinks, and he can’t help but view a coach having such antiquated information about secondary gender as falling within his purview. _ _

__“That’s… I mean, to answer your question, I haven’t exactly been feeling great about being an alpha recently. I would… jesus, I don’t know. Look, this is far enough away from reality that I really can’t say what I would do if I were in love with a beta. It’s the twenty-first century, people have all sorts of arrangements. But that’s not the point, because I’ve known Sherlock all of two days, and he hasn’t presented, and there is no credible medical study that has ever shown that age of presentation or athletic training prior to presentation have any effect on secondary gender. As far as we can tell, the phenomenon of epigenetics does not apply to this. So. Sherlock could be a beta, or he could not be. And…” John rubs at his face with both hands, trying to think of a way to put this to Grigory that isn’t going to go over too badly, “you seem to be the one invested in him being a beta, and maybe he is too, but you should probably know that there are other possibilities, that you should both probably prepare yourselves for.”_ _

__Grigory purses his lips. He doesn’t respond, which John is glad of; he doesn’t need a discussion, just needs the coach to have heard and understood. Grigory turns his attention back to the training hall for a few minutes, scanning the room and occasionally standing up and barking some orders. Sherlock is back on the platform, re-chalking his hands and feet. He hops back on the trapeze and now he’s stringing the tricks together: hanging from feet, knees and hands in equal measure, twisting in an out of positions, and John feels his mouth open involuntarily, leaving him gaping like an idiot._ _

__Grigory brings him back to himself by slapping him on the back and standing up. “You will talk to him,” he says, and John isn’t sure if it’s an order or a prediction. Then he strides purposefully back into the fray of the training hall._ _

__

__***_ _

__Sherlock is distracted during the washing-up after lunch, and leaves John to put away most of the dishes. John does it without complaint, though, and by the time he is back at the training hall, Sherlock is pacing nervously as he oversees a team of gruff stagehands in their work._ _

__When John sees what they’re doing, his face returns to the now-familiar position of the open-mouthed gape. He somehow hadn’t previously noticed the the contraption they are pulling down from the ceiling; it consists mostly of scaffolding, and so managed to blend in among the mess of rigging that forms a canopy above the training hall. Now, though, the apparatus that he looked up online is in front of him, and it’s _enormous_. The centre hub is attached to the ceiling by steel poles as well as secured to the floor with wires, and a complicated criss-cross patterns links the wheel on one side and the counterweight on the other. Sherlock is circulating among the stagehands, looking over their work. They don’t seem to mind, though; John can guess that it’s common enough for the acrobats to want to inspect their rigging. _ _

__John certainly would, if he were going to step onto… _that_. The wheel rocks gently back and forth as the wires are secured and tested. _ _

__“Nervous?” John starts; Grigory has appeared out of nowhere, grinning. John clenches his fists. “Um. Should I be?”_ _

__“Of course yes,” Grigory says. “The audience should always be nervous. That is the show. That is why you come to the circus. To believe that you watched another human only narrowly escape death.”_ _

__Sherlock steps into the wheel. He bounces a little, then leans forward, grabbing onto the sides of the circular space in front of him, pushing his weight out as far as he can. Slowly, the wheel starts to sink down and the counterweight starts to rise. Sherlock steps up higher, still using the sides of the wheel to pull himself along, and the momentum picks up to the point that he’s able to start almost walking, and John knows he’s nearly biting through his lip but he can’t stop himself when eventually the counterweight crests and starts dropping, Sherlock’s side of the contraption rising all the way overtop of the hub._ _

__It picks up speed, to the point that soon Sherlock doesn’t need to pull himself up on the side of the circular cage in order to force the momentum; he can just walk, like he’s on the world’s least practical treadmill._ _

__He remains simply walking for long enough that eventually John can spare the bandwidth to say “Well, and-- is it true? I can’t help but note that the name for this thing is-- erm. Inauspicious.”_ _

__Grigory cocks his head. “Some have died, yes,” he admits. “Shura does not plan to join them, and I have no reason to believe he will. But then, the dead did not plan to be so either.”_ _

__“That’s,” says John, “Not exactly…” he trails off, both because he isn’t completely sure how to respond to that kind of a tautology, and also because Sherlock executes a neat half-spin and starts walking backwards. It’s spinning quite quickly by now, and in the relative quiet of the first part of the training session, John can hear Sherlock’s hard breathing when he comes around the bottom._ _

__He soon spins back around to face forward and starts going through a series of jumps: waiting for as long as possible as he crest over the top and then seemingly floating across to the other side of the cage. The amazing thing, John reflects, although there are many consecutive amazing things taking place, is that it actually is possible to get used to this. It isn’t a performance, after all-- there is no music, no costumes, no heightened or manufactured sense of danger or drama. After about ten minutes of watching Sherlock jump, Grigory’s non-explanation about the danger actually starts to make a kind of strange sense. Sherlock _could_ die, that’s for certain. But he’s also simply working out. His capacity is taxed but not overloaded. _ _

__When Sherlock finally climbs down, dripping with sweat, and the stagehands start hauling the thing back up into the rafters, he approaches where John is standing. He’s alone, Grigory having wandered off to coach something involving a disturbing number of chairs stacked on top of each other in another corner of the training hall._ _

__“Well?” says Sherlock.  
John licks his lips, not quite sure what he can say that would entirely encapsulate what he’s feeling. But then, Sherlock does seem to be a man of relatively simple tastes. He likes to be praised. And John can definitely do that. _ _

__“You,” says John, meaning every syllable, “are _astounding._ ”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLB11ebKFxM) some astounding corde lisse work out of the Montreal Circus School. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgsYV-Ykog) a video of a guy who built his own wheel of death setting it up and testing it; that's a double-sided one, whereas what I had in mind for Sherlock is one of [these,](https://youtu.be/NCKVBWspOfY?t=46) probably rigged however the hell they manage [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytb-HG7nsX8). (That last video is, I believe, the same performer as the guy in the video setting up the wheel.)


	5. Chapter 5

“Come see my costumes,” says Sherlock that night. 

They’re standing in front of Sherlock’s hotel room. They had drifted away from their after-dinner duties together, talking of circus and medicine, safe topics. Now they have reached the logical end of their journey, and Sherlock is inviting him in. 

“I have quite a few,” he says, “and I kept all of them. Fourteen years of performing with Cirque Cherep. Some of them are quite ridiculous. Come see.” 

Sherlock does, indeed, have a large trunk full to the brim with performance costumes. His hotel room is so full of personal effects that it hardly seems to be a hotel room at all, which makes more sense when Sherlock explains that Cherep has been renting this block of hotel rooms for several years. “Lev likes it,” he shrugs. “Would have been cheaper to… well, really any other option would have been cheaper. But Lev likes to live in style, and the company has the money.”

John passes by the cabinet on which the hotel’s TV clearly once resided. Sherlock has had the TV removed from his room, and in its place a rather realistic-looking human skull sits surrounded by books. John stares at the skull, its jaw open wide in a way that somehow seems like it’s mcking him. Or challenging him. “What were the circumstances of your joining Cirque Cherep?” he blurts. 

Sherlock is sitting on his neatly made bed, cross-legged, with his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers steepled under his chin. “Why do you want to know?”

It’s not aggressive or angry. Closer to teasing, in fact, and John joins him in sitting on the bed without being invited. He takes a deep breath. “Because I’m curious about you,” he says simply. 

Sherlock stretches one long leg out, pointing and then flexing the toe. His ankle cracks loudly in the silence of the room. “I assure you I’m quite dull,” he says. “I’ve never done or known anything other than this in my life. Once you’ve seen me in action, you know everything there is to know about me.”

It’s not an answer, so John doesn’t let it pass as one. He stares at Sherlock’s leg instead of his face, as if they both need privacy, and winces internally at the hyperextension in the younger man’s knee when he flexes his thigh muscles. Sherlock follows John’s eyes, and cuts in on his thoughts: “Unstable, yes, but very attractive in the air when coupled with a well-developed toe point.”

When John doesn’t take that bait either, he sighs. “Surely Grigory told you the story. I came to the circus, and I just knew. I trained at home for several months, then took a cab out here and demanded to meet the head trainer and audition for them.”

“And how old were you, when that happened?”

Sherlock stretches out the other leg, spreading them into a wide straddle and leaning his torso forward slightly, a slight arch in his lower back. “You know the answer to that too,” he says off-handedly. 

John resists the temptation to allow his hands to twitch out of his lap and corporealize his discomfort when he says, “Yeah, about-- look, I shouldn’t have done that. That was… a bit not good, and the second really unprofessional thing I did to you in as many days. So. I’m sorry.”

Sherlock frowns a little in what looks like confusion. “Don’t be sorry,” he murmurs, and then, face clearing, says: “to answer your real question, the question of why a child’s parents handed them over full-time to an organization that has no youth division and no pre-existing facilities to raise children: I believe it seemed to them to be the best course of action. If you had a child who, for the first five years of their life, appeared to be obstinately mute, but who upon discovery of the circus turned out had simply never before considered anything on the planet worth the effort of speaking about-- that would be a strong argument in favour of allowing that child to follow their chosen path in life. And once I had come here and insisted on meeting Grigory, he made my case to them as well.”

John can’t help but smile at the mental image of a chubby-cheeked little Sherlock demanding imperiously to be shown to the acrobatic master at once. “So they-- what, just signed you away?”

“More or less. Technically, they put me up for adoption.”

John’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline. “Grigory?”

Sherlock shakes his head and, seemingly having sat still for long enough, places his hands in between his straddled legs and smoothly lifts up into a handstand, wobbling slightly on the unstable mattress. John leans back slightly, but he doesn’t seem likely to fall. “No,” he says from his new, upside-down vantage point, “Lev. The adoption was more of a technicality. My parents paid a small sum for my room and board for the first year, but at the end of that I started flying in some of the simpler partner and trio acts, and I also had my own handbalancing act, I suspect mostly for my age more than my skill. Audiences take a perverse pleasure in seeing small children perform. So my parents stopped paying, and my salary as a full-fledged working member was put in trust.” He lowers himself back down to sitting. “I had a rather pleasant surprise at eighteen, discovering what eleven years of enforced savings and interest can do.” 

“Wow,” says John. It’s not all that far off from the worst of his imaginings, but hearing it from his own mouth, John has to admit that it sounds like it was the right choice for the strange little boy that Sherlock must have been. 

Sherlock’s straddled legs have come back down on either side of where John is sitting, so their faces are quite close indeed when Sherlock says archly, “any further questions for the prodigy freak, Doctor?”

John is about to answer something along the lines of “way more questions than is good for me” when his phone rings. 

Since nobody from school ever calls-- only texts-- and it’s in his contract with Cherep to be available by phone 24/7, John picks it up with a small thrill of excitement, expecting to be called back to the training tent for a consultation. 

Instead, it’s Sally Donovan’s panicked voice over the line. “Doctor,” she says, sounding on the verge of tears. “It’s Lev. He took something. I called 999, they’re on their way-- but please--” 

John is on his feet and out the door before she’s finished her sentence. “I’m on my way,” he says to her, low and soothing as he can muster, and presses the elevator button, trying to remember how many flights there are in between Sherlock’s floor and the penthouse, and if it would be worth taking the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Fortunately, the elevator dings before he has time to really consider it, and he strides inside--

\--and is nearly flattened against the wall by Sherlock, slipping through the doors just as they close. “Who is it?” he gasps out. 

“In the elevator now, Sally, I’ll be there in a minute. Can you tell me what you’re seeing?” Her voice is broken up a little by the metal of the elevator, and John turns to hold a “wait” finger up to Sherlock. 

“He’s is lying on the floor in his study,” she says. “He’s not breathing. Are you coming?”

The numbers tick by slower than any elevator has ever gone in John’s life. 

“Have you done any rescue breathing?” he asks. 

“I’m doing, um, CPR,” she says, and indeed, John can hear her huffs of air as she performs chest compressions. 

Finally, the elevator deposits them at Lev’s penthouse which has been left unlocked, and John walks briskly in. No running; not when he’s in an unknown environment. As he makes his way briskly to the study, his mind flashes back briefly to the kindly, tired face of his favourite surgeon during his ER rotation, who had affixed a laminated sign to the wall of the break room reading “σπεῦδε βραδέως” and, when questioned about it, insisted that John copy down the letters and then look them up in an honest-to-goodness paper ancient-Greek-to-English dictionary to uncover their meaning: hurry slowly. John does. Sherlock, meanwhile, is a veritable tornado of activity, picking up and inspecting seemingly every object that they pass by at high speed, practically vibrating with anxiety. 

Sally hurls herself away from the body the moment John enters the room, tears streaked down her face. And that is indeed what it is; John has seen dead bodies, and the indistinct knowledge that Lev Solomin’s is now among them prickles at the back of his neck even as he bends down. He checks for breathing-- none, as Sally had determined-- and circulation; Sally had forgotten that bit before beginning chest compressions, which John wished could have mattered, but since there was none and likely hadn’t been for quite a while, there was no harm done. Or rather, no further harm that could possibly be done. 

John settles on his knees and takes over for her: two breaths, thirty compressions, deep enough that he can feel the ribs begin to give, weakly pumping barely-oxygenated blood to tissues long past having a use for it. He’s seen, on rotation, a team carry on interventions long after the patient has a use for them: when the family just needs a few more minutes, a few more compressions or shocks or injections of anything at all, so they can feel secure when they say tearfully that the doctors did all they could. John knows his role here. An insulin pump falls off of Lev’s belt clip from the force of the compressions, and John makes a mental note to mention it to the paramedics when they get there. It likely doesn’t matter at this point, but if they can confirm that his death was related to a diabetic event, at least it will save the hospital an autopsy. 

He’s sweating by the time the ambulance crew arrives, and is glad to step back and let them take control of the scene. By the time Lev’s body is bundled onto a stretcher and on its way down to the ambulance, John has coaxed Sally to Lev’s dining room table and is making tea. Sherlock is looming. He hasn’t said anything since they arrived, but when a paramedic asks if anyone would like to come in the ambulance, Sally jumps up and follows despite John’s protests, and the two of them are left alone in the now ghastly-feeling penthouse. 

Sherlock is standing on the spot where Lev’s body had been just a few moments ago. John feels his heart give a painful thump when he realizes he’s holding a syringe in the air, staring at it with a mixture of fascination and horror. 

“Shit,” says John. “When did you find that? Would have been good to send it with them. Put it down, Sherlock, we don’t know what’s in it.” 

Sherlock is absorbed in inspecting the carpet: first the centre, with its macabre depression in the fibres, then radiating outwards to the edges until he’s stalked all the way to the door, syringe in hand. Finally, he obeys, carefully placing the thing on the table, then pulling up a chair and laying his chin on his hands to stare at it, eyes level. 

John just watches. Sherlock’s grey eyes seem to harden as he mutely inspects the residue in the chamber of the syringe. 

“What was Lev to you?” John asks, sitting down at the table and trying to make eye contact. 

Sherlock keeps staring at the syringe as he says, “I told you. Technically my adoptive father. Practically, not a lot. I had about as much contact with him as any low-level member of the acrobatic corps would have, for most of my childhood.”

It’s subtle, but Sherlock’s eyes flick quickly to the side as he finishes his sentence. It is not lost on John that there is a time period omitted in that claim. “And… more recently?” he prompts, gently. 

Silence. After a minute, John takes the syringe, removes it from the table and places it on the counter on top of the microwave. He washes his hands, then returns to sit beside Sherlock. 

He takes a deep breath, and leans in close. “Sherlock. Answer me, please.”

In the moment where their eyes meet, it feels like the tension in the room shoots up so high that each individual molecule is vibrating roughly against John’s skin. Sherlock has no obligation to answer; John just wants him to.

All at once, Sherlock sits back in his chair with an annoyed sigh. “Lev wasn’t a druggie,” he says. “That I know for sure.”

John can feel the gravitational pull of the syringe on the counter, begging to differ, but he forces himself not to break eye contact with Sherlock. “How do you know?”

“He--” Sherlock’s face muscles twitch, his full lips twisting into something pained. “I-- got into some trouble. For a while, a few years ago. Like I said, I hardly knew Lev, but he made his feelings known then. He suggested that maybe I was just bored, and could do with something more challenging to occupy my time. I’d been doing pretty much the same acts since I was a child-- handbalancing, some flying in pyramids, trampoline, trapeze, silks. Lev convinced Grigory to set me some new challenges. There was nobody in the UK who did the Wheel of Death at the time, that one stuck. I’d been asking to switch to corde lisse for ages-- like silks, but more painful and dangerous. There were a few other acts I tried for a while. Essentially, so long as I was never caught high again, I was allowed significantly more artistic latitude.” He shrugs. “It wouldn’t have worked for everyone, but it worked for me.”

John licks his lips and nods slowly. He remembers what Lev had asked, the night that he had first met him: _you do what else, for this boredom?_ Suddenly, Sherlock’s sharp _no_ as an answer to that question makes sense. 

“That’s… good,” says John. “God, Sherlock, that sounds like he was a good father to you, at least once, right?” Sherlock nods, and John soldiers on despite really not wanting to say what he’s going to say next. “But… it also sounds like he might have been speaking from experience in that case. And… as much as I hope otherwise for everyone struggling with addiction… relapses happen, sometimes. Just because he was adamantly against drugs, doesn’t mean he didn’t use, at least once, today, in a moment of--” he spreads his hands, struggling to come up with a word. _Weakness_ isn’t right, not with a young man he now knows to be sober sitting across from him. 

Fortunately, Sherlock doesn’t seem to need him to finish the sentence. His fists curl, then he deliberately relaxes them, shaking out his fingers. “Yeah,” he murmurs, “yeah, guess you’re right. We’ll just have to wait for what the hospital has to say.”

After a few more minutes, John decides they’ve sat around in the apartment where Sherlock’s adoptive father died for quite long enough. One of the key cards to the suite is lying on the desk, and John takes it. Sherlock puts up no resistance to being gently shepherded down the lift and into his room. John hesitates in the doorway. Sherlock stares at him for a moment, as if he were going to say something more, but then just gives a tiny listless wave and turns to close the door. 

John places a hand on it. “Sherlock,” he says. “You-- you have my number, right?”

Sherlock nods. “They emailed it out today. You’re officially at our beck and call, 24/7.” 

“Okay. Good. Then-- I am. At your beck and call. Call me if you need me. Tonight especially.” 

Sherlock’s face relaxes infinitesimally. “I will. Good night, John.”


	6. Chapter 6

When John goes back to Lev Solomin’s former suite-- without Sherlock, this time-- it’s with a plastic bag for the syringe and nitrile gloves covering his hands. 

The first thing he notices when he enters the penthouse is the smell. He had been so single-mindedly focused on medically assessing the scene, the alpha impulse to immediately take stock of the genders who had left their mark on a space recently had been almost entirely turned off. Now, he’s aware of the deep, rooted alpha scent that was Lev’s marking on the place, mingled with Sally’s less powerful but still present scent. There’s the expected smorgasboard of simple, unobjectionable beta-- and, coursing alongside and on top of everything, a distinct and recent trace of omega. 

John frowns. There’s no reason that an omega scent in the suite should be suspicious. There are a few omegas among the support staff of the circus, and there would be plenty of reasons for one of them to have an appointment with Lev. Not to mention all the other sorts of people that Lev has to meet with regularly-- presenters, contractors, lawyers-- some even in professions where discrimination against omegas is less rampant. He shakes his head, trying to clear the alarm bells away. Scents are, as always, nothing but a distraction. Kind of like his gender itself.

He slips the syringe into a plastic bag, then reluctantly thumbs Sally’s number into his mobile. 

When she picks up, he can hear the businesslike, dreary sounds of a hospital cafeteria in the background. She’s quiet and subdued, informing him that the was pronounced dead en route, and she’s just resting for a moment before she calls a cab back to the hotel. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. It sounds as impotent as it is, but these kinds of things have to be said. “He was a good boss, wasn’t he?”

Sally sniffles and says “yeah,” very softly, and John gets the hospital’s front desk number from her before he hangs up. 

When he finally reaches a cheerful assistant at the morgue who identifies herself as Lisa, John does his best to snap himself back to full alertness and sound like the medical professional he is. “Tox screen confirmed cause of death as a cocaine overdose,” says Lisa. “He had high blood sugar, too, but it wasn’t enough to make a significant difference. Cause of death was definitely the cocaine.” 

John nods slowly, though Lisa of course can’t see him do it. “Humour me, will you,” he says. “Do you still have his insulin pump nearby?”

“Sure,” says Lisa. 

“This is going to sound insane, and maybe it is, but… I have a friend who needs convincing. Can you check what’s in the insulin pump?”

“Um,” says Lisa, “insulin?”

John squeezes his eyes shut. God, he’s tired all of a sudden. “Yeah, probably,” he admits. “Just… check for me, though, would you?”

He can practically hear Lisa roll her eyes, but she says “yeah, okay, fine,” and takes down John’s number before hanging up. 

John considers taking the syringe in the bag down to his room, but decides against it. Chances are this isn’t a crime scene, in which case he can just come get it tomorrow and dispose of it properly in his office. And it it turns out it is… well, that’s tomorrow’s problem. 

***

Training isn’t cancelled the next morning. John is surprised for a few seconds when he shows up at breakfast to find the scene unchanged from the day before— acrobats, scarfing food and coffee with foam rollers and hard rubber balls by their chairs, then jumping up to head to morning practice. He gets over it. Of course training isn’t cancelled. These people don’t cancel training for anything.

It occurs to John, as he dries dishes that Sherlock passes him, that since Lev is dead, there isn’t really any obligation for them to wash dishes according to his instructions. They do it anyway, and then wordlessly board the shuttle that takes the morning group to the tent.

John ends up being called in to ice so many knees and tape so many ankles that he simply takes up residence a the corner of the training hall, trying not to be distracted by the feats being rehearsed in the space while he securely wraps joint after unstable joint. At the break, Grigory sits beside him and when John asks whether this level of pain is normal for his athletes, he shakes his head. “Pain does not belong just to the body,” he says. “You surely know this, even if they do not teach it to you in school. Sadness, fear, anger-- comes out in the body. If this were normal day, I would say to them, stop whining and get back to work. Is not a normal day. Lev Solomin is dead, many are sad, many afraid for their futures. You think you tape ankles, when truly, you bandage emotions.” 

It appears to be substantially true. The complaints seem to multiply all morning: headaches, stomach aches, random aches and pains in body parts that are usually fine. After a while, John stops trying to tape up and analgesically spirit away the complaints; he simply asks the afflicted athletes to sit down for fifteen minutes and see if they go away. He finds that talking to them is actually rather enjoyable; they can all use the distraction of narrating their colleagues’ routines, strengths and weaknesses to him. And it it allows him to clandestinely get more information on Sherlock-- well, that’s just another bonus. 

“He’s a bit odd,” sighs a terrifyingly muscular but disarmingly demure stunt base named Patrick. “I started here three years ago, and it was like he’d been here for ages. Knew everybody, even though he doesn’t exactly go to great lengths to make friends. Can’t have been here that long, he’s young-- and unpresented, which keeps him a bit apart socially, I’m afraid. I’d like to get to know him, but hanging out with someone unpresented just feels a bit too much like cradlerobbing, you know? He doesn’t seem to have all that many friends besides, well, you. You two seem to have kinda bonded, huh?”

John nods thoughtfully, internally roiling. It had never even occurred to him that having mere social relations with an unpresented adult could be creepy, but now that he thought about it, he can see how eyebrows might raise at the idea of an alpha alone in the rooms of someone unpresented. God, what _didn’t_ his gender fuck up for him?

There is a small rotating crowd of resting acrobats around him now, and Grigory is at the very least turning a blind eye to it, if not actively encouraging them to take extra breaks. John is relieved; Grigory can be harsh, but he does have the best interests of his charges in mind. 

He is just finishing up with Molly, who wants KT tape on her shoulder-- useless stuff, John is quite sure, but no reason she shouldn’t have her placebo of choice, today of all days-- when his phone rings. 

He steps into the hallway, away from the boisterous noise of the training hall and into the relative silence of the space outside his office. “Afternoon,” says the voice over the phone with the professional cheer that can only belong to someone with a very morbid job, “It’s Lisa, from the morgue. You’re never going to believe this.”

***

“Come to my office with me before you start training this aft,” he says to Sherlock as they finish up the washing after lunch. “I need to talk to you about something.” 

Sherlock turns his bright, irritatingly perceptive eyes on him, but doesn’t say anything, just nods. They take the shuttle back to the tent together in silence, and when they reach John’s office-- John decided that it would be better to meet Sherlock one-on-one here, as opposed to his bedroom, which he had just realized that morning could be construed as inappropriate-- John takes the time to settle himself in his desk chair before clearing his throat. Sherlock has hopped up on the examining table, in the same position he favoured on his bed yesterday-- knees splayed with his elbows propped on them, long fingers steepled under his chin. “This is about Lev,” he observes. 

John nods. “I… yeah. I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, honestly, but… the police are being called in today. You may have been right.” 

Sherlock’s eyes glint. “I’m usually right,” he says unselfconsciously. “And I knew I was about this. Lev didn’t die of an overdose?”

John can feel the blood thrumming in his ears, like it has been from the moment he got off the phone with Lisa. He must be in a different reality, one where things like this _happen_ to him, but he isn’t. He’s in his new office with his only friend so far, and he’s about to tell him that his adoptive father was murdered. “He did die of an overdose,” says John. “It just… didn’t come from a syringe.” 

Sherlock’s brows knit, then his eyes widen. “His insulin pump?”

John nods. “I had a hunch. Asked the morgue assistant to test it-- she thought I was nuts, but she did it. There was liquid cocaine loaded into his insulin pump. No matter how much of a junkie someone was, um, that would be a very strange way to administer a dose.”

Sherlock jumps to his feet with so much energy that he seems to surprise himself. He winces for a moment, then places a hand on his stomach. 

“You okay?” John checks. 

Sherlock shakes his head, more a dismissal than a _no_. “I’m fine,” he says. “We need to go look at Lev’s rooms again. We should have done it in the first place-- someone could have been back there to clean up the evidence. When are the police coming?” The last question is delivered in a half-shout, as he’s already yanked open the door and started sweeping down the hallway. John trots along in his wake. 

“Lisa-- she’s the morgue assistant-- she called me before she called the police. Said she was going to as soon as she’d finished the paperwork, and that was about three quarters of an hour ago. I doubt they’re going to be here imminently, considering it’s not really urgent any more. Sherlock-- the police _are_ coming, are you sure we should disturb the crime scene?”

Sherlock actually turns around just so John can see his eye roll, John suspects. “We’re not going to disturb it,” he says. “We’re going to look at it before anyone _else_ disturbs it.”

***

The suites, at least to John, look exactly the same as they did yesterday. Sherlock sweeps his gaze over the carpet with a critical eye, and that’s when John clicks a little more in tune with the senses he usually represses--

“Someone has been here,” Sherlock says. “Look at the carpet. They tried, but they couldn’t return every fibre to its previous position. Footsteps.”

“It was an omega,” says John, and Sherlock’s eyes snap to him. “I smelled it yesterday, after you left-- I think it was the same person.”

“Useful,” says Sherlock, seeming genuinely impressed. “They came--” his finger tracks across the study, then his eyes narrow. “The computer. Lev was working on a laptop, yesterday-- it was on his desk.” 

“Shit,” says John. There is, glaringly, no laptop on the desk.

Sherlock is at the desk, pulling out a pair of socks from his backpack as makeshift gloves as he rustles through the papers. “No point in making myself a suspect,” he mutters. “I don’t think anything else was taken.”

“So this wasn’t a crime of passion,” John muses. “Somebody would have had to think through very carefully how to get the cocaine into Lev’s insulin supply, then have had an access card to come up here and steal the laptop. But how the fuck would a _circus_ owner make himself enemies like that?”

“How the fuck indeed,” Sherlock murmurs. He’s frowning down at the desk, but John, with enough experience of both internally- and externally- focused pain, recognizes that he’s not responding to what he’s seeing any more.

“You feeling alright?” he asks. 

Sherlock bites his lip. “Not sure,” he admits. 

At that moment, there’s the snick of a hotel key card in the door, and the kindly woman from the front desk says “Right in here, Inspector,” and three police constables enter the room. They draw up short when they see Sherlock and John. The one who seems to be in charge is a tall, imposing woman with a nameplate that reads “Gregson.” She’s dark-skinned with a head full of braids pulled back from her face in a large ponytail, and an omega, and carries herself with the air of someone who’s had to get in plenty of fistfights to earn the respect she deserves and is plenty ready to take on another one. John envies her. She sweeps sharp brown eyes over them and snaps, “Who are you, then?”

Before John has a chance to respond, Sherlock steps forward. He seems-- hesitant, somehow, changed, his posture slumping and eyes losing some of their brightness as he says hesitantly, “Hello, Miss-- um, Constable-- hi. I’m Sherlock, um, my dad, he--” he waves his long arms around floppily, indicating the room around them. “My dad died in here yesterday, and you’re here to investigate, right?”

Gregson’s eyes immediately soften, and she places a gentle hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. “Hello, Sherlock,” she says, “I’m Tammy. Yes, we’re here to take a look around. The hospital found some unusual substances in your dad’s insulin supply, and we just want to make sure we know all about what happened to him. Is it okay if we tape up this study? We just don’t want anything to be moved, now that it’s a crime scene.”

Sherlock nods his head and sniffles a little. It’s _very_ convincing. John steps towards the door after Sherlock. “I’m, uh, his friend,” he says, and Tammy just smiles and says, “Good, it’s good of you to be taking care of him,” and then turns to direct the other two people with her. 

“Do you want to stay?” John asks. 

Sherlock, still in character as the grieving son-- which he _is,_ John has to keep reminding himself, just not exactly quite like _this_ \-- shakes his head mutely.

“We’ll just be going, then,” John calls to them. “Can I-- can I give you my number? In case you find anything?”

“Of course,” says Tammy, and hands John her phone. John puts his own number in it and hands it back to her, and she promises to keep them abreast of the case.

As soon as they’re back in the elevator, Sherlock favours him with a broad grin. John can’t help but laugh. “Shit,” he says, “I had no idea you were such a good actor.”

Sherlock sniffs, but is clearly pleased with the compliment. “You’ve mostly seen the athletic portion of my job, so far,” he says, “But the final product _is_ a performance. We do acting classes once a week, here. Or at least we did.” He shrugs. “Who knows what’ll happen with-- whoever replaces Lev.”

“So-- what _does_ happen now? Is there a board of directors, or something?”

Sherlock shrugs. “Never cared enough to look into it,” he admits. Then his face pulls again into the pained expression he’s been showing on and off all morning, and John can’t help himself. He hits the button for Sherlock’s floor, stopping the lift. 

John looks significantly at the doors as they open. “Okay, I’m going to ask this again and you’re going to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: how are you feeling?”

Sherlock’s hands flex, and his hip angle closes slightly, not quite doubling over, just the shadow of an impulse. His eyes flick to the hallway outside his room, unsure. “I’m probably fine,” he says hesitantly, “but I haven’t been feeling quite… right, all morning.”

John gestures towards the open doors. “Look, Grigory is being pretty lenient today. I think you should get some rest, and I’ll make your excuses.” He steps towards Sherlock and places a hand on his back, intending to shoo him gently out of the lift.

Sherlock flinches back violently. John is startled, jumping back as well, and Sherlock’s eyes go wide as he realizes his own reaction. “Sorry!” he says. “Sorry-- just twitchy today.” He steps out of the elevator and starts walking quickly down the hall towards his room. 

So quickly that John can’t quite keep up at a normal walking pace. When he jogs after him, Sherlock seems to speed up his pace. 

_Shit,_ thinks John. _Grigory is not going to be happy._ He fervently hopes he’s wrong. It’s early fall; perhaps Sherlock has a touch of the flu. Perhaps he really is just tired and sad, like everyone else. But John has a sneaking, not-entirely-medically-based suspicion of what’s going on here, and now is _really_ not a good time for one of Cirque Cherep’s most deeply embedded members to finally undergo puberty and have his first heat. 

Sherlock reaches his room, opening his door with fingers that tremble. “I’m fine,” he tries again, and this time he turns around to face John, keeping a safe distance between them. “I think you’re right-- I just need to sleep a bit more, probably. I’ll call Grisha. He, um…” Sherlock’s fingers twist around each other nervously. “He’ll be fine with it. Have a good afternoon, John, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Abruptly, the door slams in John’s face. 

John sighs. He can hear Sherlock rustling around inside his room, and worse, he’s starting to be able to _smell_ him. It’ll take a day or so before the heat begins in earnest, but-- yep. 

Sherlock Holmes is an omega. And a professional acrobat. And John is both his doctor and, apparently, his only friend, and he needs to go break the news to Grigory Leskov.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is short because the next one is long, for reasons you might at this point be able to guess ;)

John puts it off until after the afternoon training. Sherlock said he was going to call and claim illness, and John agrees that Grigory is likely to be lenient so long as he doesn’t make any mention of the cause, which he’s almost certain Sherlock isn’t going to. No, that honour is reserved exclusively for John. 

When he arrives for dinner, though, something is wrong. 

The kitchen staff are in an absolute tizzy. Pete’s second-in-command is standing in the swinging doors between the dining room and the kitchen, screaming orders. The rest are wearing pinched expressions as they shuttle dishes out of the kitchen to the front of long lines. 

John sees Grigory immediately, near the back of the line. He steels himself and is about to ask to speak to him privately, when Grigory waves him over first. 

“Can you believe this?” he asks, waving his hand in the general direction of the kitchen. 

“Um, what’s happened?” John asks. 

“Motherfucker just disappeared,” Grigory says. “Pete. This afternoon. Didn’t even leave plans for dinner.”

“What?” stammers John. “The… the head cook, right? The omega.” 

Grigory rolls his eyes. “You alphas. All you see is gender. But yes. Him. Gone without a trace.”

An omega who would have had access to Lev’s rooms, gone without a trace the day after his death. John is no detective, but that seems highly unlikely to be coincidental. His first impulse is to go tell Sherlock, and then he remembers that Sherlock is not receiving at the moment, and particularly not receiving unbonded alphas, and oh yes, that’s actually what he’s come to tell Grigory. 

“I, um…” he glances forward in the line. It’s moving slowly, as they seem to keep running out of fish and need to run back into the kitchen to replenish the dishes, but it is moving. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”

Grigory just grunts. “It can wait until after I’ve eaten. I will come to your room. Yes?”

John is suddenly not hungry in the slightest. He mumbles an affirmative and slinks up to his hotel room, stomach roiling. 

His room-- being two floors directly above Sherlock’s-- is starting to become slightly fragrant with Sherlock’s beginning heat. He feels his heart sinking. Not only is Grigory going to be absolutely beside himself, but-- well, Sherlock had been pretty much the only friend that John had made here, so far. And now that he’s an omega, that’s undoubtedly going to change. 

It shouldn’t, of course, but John isn’t naive. He’s known friends who were either torn apart or brought together-- usually briefly-- by presenting as alpha and omega. It usually happened when they were young teenagers, of course, and had plenty of time to rearrange their social circles to suit their new reality. Sherlock is twenty-two years old, and his life is about to change forever, and… John has a sudden, painful recollection of Grigory, shrugging as he said, _So: he saw you. He knew. Not so different._ And Patrick, the acrobat he’d been talking to only that morning, in his understated way: _You two seem to have kinda bonded, huh?_

It’s true. They had… bonded, even if not in the sense that they now _could_ theoretically bond. But they’re friends. And yeah, maybe Grigory had even been right that Sherlock feels-- something, for John, but the fact remains that he had closed the door in his face, and being fascinated with someone before presenting was a very different thing from wanting to spend a heat with them. 

He’s lying flat on his back on the bed, trying and only mostly succeeding not to get a very inconvenient erection, when Grigory knocks smartly. John shows him in, awkwardly indicating the only chair in the room while he perches on the edge of the bed.  
“So, um, did Sherlock call you?” he asks.

Grigory nods. “He has stomachache.” 

“Yeah,” says John. “I think-- that might not actually be the problem. Well, I say problem. It’s not a medical problem, per se.”

Grigory’s eyebrows knit together. He looks almost offended. “Shura has not missed training for many years,” he protests. “He would not call me unless he were truly sick.”

John takes a deep breath. There’s no reason to be so nervous, he reminds himself. After all, it’s nothing to do with him. This is just him as a doctor, letting the head athletic trainer know information about an athlete’s medical status that is necessary for his training status. 

Yep. Okay.

“He’s presenting,” he says in a rush. “Sherlock is an omega, and presenting means undergoing his first heat. He’s going to be away from training for several days.”

It’s extraordinary: for a moment, John gets as clear a picture as he’s ever likely to have of what Sherlock sees when he reads John like an open book. Grigory’s face goes through an astonishing series of emotions, which John can read clear as day: first pure, unadulterated horror, then anger-- at Sherlock? At John? At the world at large? At himself, for not predicting or preventing it? Then, tamping down what he knows to be an unkind an unhelpful reaction taking a deep, steadying breath, and finally speaking. “This is… not as I expected,” he admits. 

With the initial reveal out of the way, John can relax. “I know,” he says, as gently as he can. “And from what I gather, it’s not going to be easy for Sherlock, from here on out, as an acrobat and an omega. And I want you to know that as his doctor, I will do everything I can to help. Heat suppressants are… starting to get more effective, although they have side effects and they don’t always work for everyone. It’s an option to explore, though. And as for the rest-- look, I know I haven’t been here long, but it seems to me that Sherlock is a really important member of this troupe, right?” Grigory nods. 

John continues, trying to choose his words carefully, “It seems to me that when an omega-- or, well, any gender, really-- is driven out of a line of work because of their gender, it’s often only partly the actual attributes that make them supposedly… unsuitable.” His stomach twists, remembering watching Mike Stamford’s face as he read John’s rejection letter. He is _not_ going to let that happen to Sherlock. “And part of it is just pure discrimination. It seems to me that Sherlock is accepted here, and respected, and so long as that doesn’t change going forward--” _and if it does, the asshat responsible will have me to answer to_ \-- “then I think he’s going to be just fine.”

 _Possessiveness,_ John realizes distantly as he watches something very like a smile play for dominance on Grigory’s face. _Careful, Watson._

Finally, the smile seems to break through, and completely take over Grigory’s gruff countenance. 

“Ivanushka, do not worry so much. He’s afraid, I am sure, but he will want you.”

John gapes. “What?”

Grigory stands up, pressing on his thighs as his knees crack with the movement. “He sent you away, yes? Otherwise you would be with him now. I will talk with him. I think he worries that I will be angry, that it will ruin his career. I will talk to him.”

Grigory is heading towards the door, and John is starting to feel panicked. “And say, um, what exactly?”

Grigory turns around, towering over John. “Oh, nothing to do with you,” he laughs. “No, Vanya, I will only tell him that I accept him, and we will make his training work as he is, and it will be okay. The rest, you must figure out yourself.”


	8. Chapter 8

John has no intention of “figuring out” anything with Sherlock. 

Sherlock told him to leave. Sherlock shut the door in his face, knowing full well what was happening, and wanting no help from John either as a doctor or as an alpha. That is evidence enough in favour of staying far away from him for the next few days. Probably, he admits with a pang, forever. 

That night is _awful._ It’s not so much the scent, although that’s getting quite strong, and John pities any other alphas staying near them in the hotel. It’s the knowledge of what’s surely happening to Sherlock, all alone, without so much as an elementary school health class to guide him through it. His cock, jutting out hard from beneath his taut, well-muscled stomach, hard and wanting no matter how many times he takes himself in hand. His channel dripping, begging to be filled and claimed, his skin burning with the desire for an alpha to fill him and cover him and wrest control of his feverish, unruly body from him. No heat suppressants, no toys, nothing but his own hands and the nagging worry that everything his body is doing right now spells the end of his career. And not just his career; John knows that for Sherlock, being an acrobat is hardly just that. For chrissakes, he never _talked_ as a kid before discovering the circus. What would he be left, without it? 

John hopes that Grigory kept his promise to reassure him. He also hopes he had the good sense to call him instead of showing up at his hotel room, where Sherlock was probably busy sobbing with unfulfilled need and rutting into the mattress. Betas could be, in general, a little clueless about such things, and it would surely not improve Sherlock’s mood to have Grigory see him like that. 

Finally, John falls into the fitful sleep that Sherlock probably isn’t managing, waking early feeling unrefreshed and wound tight as a spring. 

He washes the dishes after breakfast by himself, having grown used to the habit and seeing no reason to give it up, especially now that Pete has mysteriously-- and extremely suspiciously-- disappeared. A pang shoots through him, the vague feeling that he should be _doing_ something about this-- but somehow, it feels impossible without Sherlock. He needs to talk to him. He can’t talk to him. He’s less careful with the dishes than he should be, and takes a chip out of a plate. He puts it back in the cupboard anyway. 

He manages to get to his office before training starts, just in time for a young man John hasn’t seen before to show up and insist at high volume and, eventually, pitch, that the previous doctor was perfectly willing to inject cortisone into his mess of a knee multiple times a month. When John recoils in horror and tries to convince him to come in and sit down to discuss his injury and treatment plan, he mutters “never mind, asshole, now I’m gonna be late for warmup,” and limps off. 

Then John smells it. Smells _him_.

He’s out of his chair and into the hallway, door banging shut behind him. He should probably lock the door, but doesn’t. He’s in the training hall in the space of a few seconds and scanning the warmup lineup. 

_Jesus H. buggering fucking hell._ Sherlock bloody Holmes is lying on the corner of the floor, one foot up on a block as he stretches his middle split, sporting a pair of very baggy shorts, a pained expression, and entirely too much sweat on his brow for five minutes into a light stretching session. 

Grigory is ignoring him entirely, gently batting at Molly’s toes while she holds an implacable handstand. John simply inserts himself in between Molly and Grigory, and he would relish the shocked expression on the older man’s face if he weren’t so _fucking furious._

“How could you allow him to train?” he demands. There’s no point asking if it had been Sherlock’s idea to drag himself to a training session in the middle of a heat; John is entirely sure that the answer is yes. But he is equally sure that it should have been Grigory’s job to not let him set foot in the training hall.

Grigory flaps his arms helplessly. “He wanted to come. He said he feels fine.”

John grabs Grigory’s shoulders, yanking him around to force him to look at Sherlock, who has pulled the leg on the block inwards to get out of his split, which has the effect of curling him into a tiny ball of misery on the floor, from which position he is visibly trying and failing to extricate himself. His oversized shorts pooling on the floor beneath his prone form would, in other circumstances, perhaps be funny. “Are you fucking blind? Does he look fine to you?”

The discomfort now radiating from the coach is somewhat gratifying, and John releases his shoulders. Molly has stepped down from her handstand and is staring at the pair of them uncertainly. “I’m just going to… start my tumbling warmup…” she practically whispers. 

“You do that,” says John, his eyes not leaving Grigory’s. She steps away, launching into a series of roundoffs with half-twists on the rebound across the floor, which strikes John as a very effective method of getting herself as far away from the tension between him and Grigory as possible, and one that he would likely take advantage of, if he had the ability. 

“I’m going to escort your precious Shura back to his room now,” says John deliberately. “And if he shows up here again in anything other than the peak of normalcy and non-estral health, you are to act like a goddamned adult and turn him away. Do you understand me, Grishka?”

Grigory tenses, then simply nods, his eyes darting infinitesimally away from John’s. John feels a weight physically lift off his shoulders now that that conversation is over and he appears to have won it, despite the fact that all he’s won is the ability to actually do the hard part. 

Sherlock is still curled in a ball when John arrives to loom over him. John knows that he notes his arrival, because there is no way on the planet that a brand-new omega could _not_ notice an unbonded alpha suddenly standing over him, and also because he groans loudly and says, “go away. I’m trying to stretch.” 

It’s such a patently ridiculous claim that John actually barks out a surprised laugh, despite the sting of the rebuke. “And what are you stretching, exactly?”

Sherlock lets out a shuddering breath. “Adductors,” he says. “In a moment.”

John purses his lips. As much as he’s tempted to just grab Sherlock under the arms and haul him out of the training hall in a fireman’s carry, it’s-- well, just that. Temptation. Only part of him is truly concerned with getting his friend back to his room safely. The other part is salivating at the thought of the heavy weight of the omega across his shoulders, feeling Sherlock’s cock rub against his shoulder as he walked-- no. No. That is not the point here. He clenches his fists hard and releases them slowly. 

“Sherlock,” he says, “One way or the other, you are leaving this training hall and going back to your room. How you get there is up to you. Now, you apparently managed to get here on your own, so if you think you can get back unassisted, then you’re welcome to try. If there’s someone besides me that you’d like to help you, then god knows I’ll understand. But if neither of those options appeals, I am going to pick you up and carry you to your room. I will leave you there alone once you’re there, swear to God.” _God, hold me to that,_ he prays fervently. 

There’s a pause, during which he can see the muscles in Sherlock’s face working and John practically can’t breathe. Then, Sherlock unfurls a tiny bit, just enough to reach one hand up and crack and eye open, staring at John balefully from the floor, like some sort of pitiful swamp creature being awakened from a very uncomfortable slumber. He contradicts himself immediately, holding his hand up in an obvious invitation while saying hesitantly, “please don’t.”

John’s heart, which was beating quickly in the first place, is now seemingly trying to make a panicked escape from his chest. He stares at Sherlock’s hand, trying to parse the extraordinary combination of messages. When it isn’t withdrawn, and Sherlock keeps staring up at him expectantly, he hesitantly reaches down and grabs it. 

Sherlock immediately sighs in relief. Despite his hesitation, as soon as he feels the touch of an alpha he pulls into it, scrambling to his feet as John tugs him up gently. It’s just hormonal; John knows that, and he isn’t going to take advantage. Still, even in a room full of mostly betas, some primal part of him preens at the knowledge that other people can see him pulling Sherlock into him, the younger man draping an arm over his shoulders and clinging to him. _Dumb alpha impulses. Ignore them, or you’re going to ruin this._

Grigory studiously avoids looking at them as they lumber out the side door of the training hall together like some sort of strange, lopsided animal. By a stroke of extraordinary, luck, the hotel shuttle that brought the acrobats to the hall for morning training is still there, and John waves as cheerily as he can to the driver. The driver, as it turns out, is an omega, and his eyes go wide as he both sees and smells the two men approaching the bus. 

By the time they’ve settled into the front row of seats, an alpha’s touch is no longer the reassuring thing that it had been when Sherlock first accepted his help-- he’s clinging to John with both arms, shaking, and John wants desperately to glance down to check if he’s leaking onto the leather of the shuttle seat but he doesn’t, because he doesn’t want to embarass Sherlock and also because there isn’t really much he can do about it if the answer is yes. 

The shuttle comes to a stop outside the hotel and instead of subjecting Sherlock to the ordeal of standing up, John takes the liberty of simply gathering him into his arms across his lap. Sherlock’s hands immediately clasp behind his neck, and he buries his nose in John’s throat, and _shit,_ now John’s own erection is making walking rather difficult, but he ignores it and simply relishes how the flood or hormones make the feat of lifting Sherlock-- who is lithe but apparently all muscle, and accordingly rather heavier than he looks-- if not easy, at least resoundingly satisfying. 

When he gets to Sherlock’s door, he has to release his legs to the floor to allow the omega to dig in his pocket for his key card. Once the door is open, Sherlock, having apparently decided that walking is a task reserved for people who aren’t him, pulls sharply at John’s neck and brings his legs back up into John’s arms until John reaches the bed and deposits him on it as gently as he can, which under the circumstances is far more akin to a throw than he would have liked. 

Sherlock doesn’t let go. 

John lets out a deep breath. _Steady on, Watson._ “We’re here,” he points out.

Sherlock doesn’t move. 

The tension in his chest and his head and his cock are going to physically kill him if he doesn’t either flee this instant, or pin Sherlock to the bed and shove a knot in him. _No._

“Sherlock,” he says. “At the training hall… you said, ‘please don’t.’ I know it’s hard to let go now, love, but you don’t want this. You said so. I promise.”

Sherlock’s hands tighten around his neck, and John his considering yanking his head away when his voice scratches out: “You said you were going to leave me alone.”

“I did,” says John. “I will. Promise.” 

For a moment, Sherlock’s eyes clear, and he’s staring at John in a way that says _you’re a moron_ even through the haze of need. 

“Oh,” breathes John. “Please don’t… leave. Oh.”

“That one,” sighs Sherlock as he finally lets go of John’s neck and relaxes into the mattress. 

John allows himself to be drawn in, sitting on the edge of the bed. He turns his head away for a moment, trying to get just one clarifying whiff of air that isn’t thick with heat-scent. Whether it’s the air, or the intention, it works; though his prick is still unbearable between his thighs, it’s more theoretically unbearable than actually something that he can’t possibly bear. 

Not that Sherlock is helping. Now that John is marginally committed to not leaving the bed, he’s flipped himself over and started fucking into the mattress, and he’s-- _jesus_. John squeezes his eyes closed, then opens them, wondering where he’s supposed to look. This isn’t something he’s supposed to see. Sherlock, if he were in his right mind, wouldn’t want John ogling with unabashed lust as he desperately wriggles out of his shorts and pants, exposing his dripping arse to the open air and then inelegantly reaching back and shoving a finger in. 

The noise he makes is loud and keening and absolutely riveting, and John comes to a conclusion that he will only later be able break down into several points, which can be summarized as:

1\. This is incredibly, mind-bendingly, life-alteringly hot.  
2\. Although John is a fairly sexual person, and there is no doubt that he would be fairly affected by the sight and smell of any old omega whimpering and fucking himself right in front of his eyes, Sherlock Holmes is _not_ just any omega.  
3\. He just might be utterly, irretrievably gone on this man.  
4\. There is _no fucking way_ he is going to allow their first time to be in response to a heat that Sherlock doesn’t want and didn’t even know was coming. 

After that, it is actually fairly easy. The decision is made; he can safely ignore any protests that his cock, nose, or any other inconvenient part of his anatomy make, because he will not be fucking a damn thing tonight. Not even his hand, provided Sherlock truly wants him to stay.  
So when Sherlock gasps out, “Please. I need to you fuck me. I need your knot. John, _please,_ ” it is not only possible but actually, in its own small way thrilling, to discard entirely the primal urge to comply with the request and instead simply place a gentle hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, stilling him somewhat. 

“No,” he murmurs. “No, I’m not going to fuck you. I’ll help in any way I can, Sherlock, but not that.”

The noise that emerges from Sherlock’s throat bears only a scant resemblance to the word “Why?”

John clears his throat, and considers it. All in all, the situation seems quite desperately uneven. Sherlock’s body has taken over, and is providing John with access to the worst kind of primal honesty possible. In the face of Sherlock unwillingly revealing so much, it seems only fair for John to offer something raw in return. 

“Because I adore you entirely too much,” he says quickly, recklessly. _In for a penny, in for a pound,_ he hears in his mother’s voice, absurdly. The admission is enough to break through Sherlock’s haze a little bit, and he cracks his eyes open, the three fingers now buried in his arse stilling. 

John smiles, forcing himself to make eye contact as he continues, “There you have it. It’s only a brief moratorium on fucking you, by the way. Ask me again in a few days, and I’ll gladly pound you into any bed, wall, or acrobatic apparatus you like, provided the risks to my personal safety are minimal. Just… not now. Not like this.”

John is half-expecting-- dreading, really-- to meet with resistance. To discover that Sherlock, at least in this moment, values what John can give him now over what he is offering. Or that maybe Grigory had been wrong, and he never wanted anything from John in the first place, and now John is just a warm body with a knot, and useless if he refuses to use it. 

Instead, Sherlock emits something that sounds very much like a sob and rolls over, burying his face in a pillow. His shoulders shake slightly, and John wonders if it will be worse or better to touch him. After a moment’s consideration, he decides it probably doesn’t matter: he has no desire to sit here all night with a foot of air in between the two of them. The skin of Sherlock’s back is smooth and lightly freckled, now tacky with sweat, and John begins with his palm over the C3 vertebra and rubs in slowly expanding circles until he’s covering the whole of the available skin n a sweeping oval. His fingers trail through a trickle of slick arousal that has made its way down Sherlock’s crack and into his lumbar curve. 

He needs _something_ in his arse, John recognizes, if he’s going to be even mildly comfortable. He’s never spent a heat with an omega, but he’s had both girlfriends and boyfriends in the past who described the experience, and were very clear upon that point-- the desire to be filled is central to the desperate need of estrus.

Sherlock is scissoring his fingers inside himself, and John realizes that he’s going to have to leave-- for a few minutes, anyway-- if he’s going to be able to help with this in a way that doesn’t tip over into actual fucking. 

“Hey,” he says, withdrawing his hand. “I have, um, something that might help. But I’m going to need to go to my room for a few moments. You stay here and… keep working on that, okay? I know you’re not going to be satisfied without a knot, but you can at least come a few times and be a bit more comfortable.” 

Sherlock just groans in response, but he doesn’t protest when John pushes himself off the bed and quickly slips out of the room. The cool, comparatively scent-free air of the hallway is a relief, but he doesn’t let himself savour it. 

Like any self-respecting alpha, John has a few toys. He rarely uses them himself, but he’s not above the occasional one-night stand, and omegas out of heat are far more likely to be generous with their mouths when they’ve got a vibrator in the arse keeping them happy during the act. So… it’s self-serving, really, for him to keep something on hand, and right now he’s desperately thankful that he does. It takes a bit of digging through the yet-unpacked corners of his suitcase, but he eventually locates the large, vibrating plug stashed in with his lesser-used toiletries. 

When he gets back to Sherlock’s room, he notices with relief that he’s already spent once onto the white sheets of the hotel bed. He’s working himself over with slightly less desperate frenzy now, but clearly building back up quickly. He gasps and lifts his head to look at John, and his eyes immediately focus on the anal vibrator that John hadn’t even bothered concealing as he hurtled up the two flights of stairs from his room. 

“I, um,” says John, “Do you… want this?”

He sees just the faintest shadow of nervousness pass over Sherlock’s face, and is reminded that this is all new for him; despite the abstract desire for a knot in his arse, he likely hasn’t put anything nearly as big as the vibrator in there before in reality. Maybe even not anything at all-- although now that he considers the question, he honestly can’t figure out whether he imagines Sherlock would have experimented with every type of sex available to him, or would have had no interest in the exercise whatsoever. Considering most adults would find having sex with someone unpresented as slightly creepy, he suspects Sherlock might not have a lot of experience in this area.

Sherlock is nodding, but instead of reaching out for it, he simply pushes himself up onto his knees, arse in the air in an obvious invitation. 

John hesitates. He truly doesn’t want to do anything that a non-estral Sherlock could interpret as taking advantage, but… if he’s going to lend him a vibrator, surely it’s not any great leap to also insert it for him.

He climbs back onto the bed. Sherlock’s hole is red and irritated from the careless friction of his own fingers, and it’s impossible for John not to imagine sliding his cock inside instead as he gently parts his cheeks with one hand, holding Sherlock’s lower back steady with the other, and positions the vibrator at the opening of his hole. He flicks it on, the tip just brushing against his entrance, and Sherlock gasps at the vibration he starts pushing it gently in. He can see Sherlock’s face, hanging down in between his arms, and his eyes are screwed shut in a way that doesn’t quite indicate pain, so John keeps pushing until the vibrator is seated to the hilt and he can actually feel the residual vibrations with the hand resting on Sherlock’s back. 

“Good?” he asks.

Sherlock’s eyes are still shut, tense and crinkled at the edges. He sucks in a shuddering breath and nods quickly, once, before flopping back down onto his stomach with just enough space under his hips to grasp his cock and continue pumping hard. 

John lets his own breath out. He maybe shouldn’t watch, but goddamn he _wants_ to, and Sherlock isn’t paying attention to him anyway as he buries his face in the mattress and pounds into his own fist. He’s gorgeous, sweat-slicked and tear-stained, desperate and sticky and glorious. 

_Maybe I could have him like this,_ John thinks. _One day. If I don’t screw this up._

Sherlock comes again, but he hardly seems satisfied; he’s still writhing, brow furrowed and arse thrusting involuntarily into the air. He turns his face towards John, and John can see that he truly is crying. He feels a pang of inadequacy. Despite his desire to sympathize, and his medical knowledge of the heat cycle in the abstract, he truly has no idea what Sherlock is going through right now. Every time John been aroused in his life, the feeling has been at best marvellous, and at worst mildly irritating, if it happens at the wrong moment. The idea of arousal so intense that it manifests as abject misery is foreign to him. 

“It’s not enough,” whispers Sherlock, and he sounds utterly defeated. 

“I’m sorry,” says John, feeling more useless than he’s ever felt before in his life.

“I just wish I could think about something besides this feeling,” Sherlock continues brokenly. “God, just for a few seconds.” 

John frowns. 

Before he can question the wisdom of what he’s doing-- almost before the conscious thought has crossed his mind-- he raises his open hand and delivers a ringing slap to the back of Sherlock’s left thigh. 

Sherlock startles a little, limbs twitching off the mattress as the sharp sting shoots through him. Then he stills, and his lips part slightly. 

Fear and regret pool in John’s belly for a moment, hot and uncomfortable, because you can’t just fucking hit people on the off-chance that they might find it helpful, and he stammers “Sorry-- is-- like that…?”

“That,” says Sherlock, “it-- do it again.”

John smacks the other thigh, not too hard but sharp. Sherlock drops his head down onto his folded hands. His face is turned towards John now, so even though it’s basically inaudible, John can still see his lips move to form the word, “Please.” His eyes close, and he lies there, waiting. 

John shifts more fully onto the bed, pulling his feet underneath him to be able to have access to Sherlock’s entire body at a glance. He swallows. Now he actually has something to _do_ , something that could maybe actually help, he feels some nerves himself. He should start slow, he realizes; the goal being to build up a distracting level of endorphins without actually hurting him too much. 

He starts in slightly lower on Sherlock’s thighs, allowing his smacks to get lighter but closer together, while still trying to vary the tempo and intensity to make this as absorbing as possible. He slowly works his way down Sherlock’s legs, all the way to the ankles, before heading back up. He steels his nerves as he forces his hand to start landing blows on Sherlock’s muscular, now slightly sticky arse.

To his relief, once he’s there it doesn’t actually feel any more intimate than striking his thighs does; and with the cushion of a few more scant layers of fat, he can strike a little bit harder. 

He watches Sherlock’s face as he does it. John is no stranger to the appeal of a few hard smacks during sex, and he’d been worried that, instead of providing a distraction from the arousal, this would only serve to make it sharper. He’s glad to see that doesn’t seem to be the case. He works thoroughly over Sherlock’s arse until he begins to make small noises of pain, and then moves up, working over the ropes of muscle on either side of his spine, he can see Sherlock forcing himself not to flinch away from the pain. He’s taking deep breaths and relaxing into the feeling of John’s hand tenderly abusing every inch of skin available to him, and John feels a rush of relief and gratitude at the thought that that takes effort, it _must_ take at least a tiny bit of thought and attention, to consciously choose to welcome pain into your body. 

When he finally runs out of back, having found he rather enjoyed the opportunity to ogle Sherlock’s frankly astonishing musculature unencumbered, John is rather proud of the result. Sherlock’s face has finally relaxed, mouth sagging open a little bit and eyes shut softly instead of being squeezed closed. 

John finds that not only does he want to keep giving Sherlock what he needs-- John is also enjoying himself rather a lot, now. Being useful feels good, and Sherlock’s body feels good against his now-slightly-red hand, so he gently nudges a finger against Sherlock’s shoulder and says, “other side.”

With no hesitation, Sherlock rolls over. His cock is half-hard, and the plug is still buzzing gently inside of him, but he seems unwilling to do anything about it, so John starts in. He’s gentler, delivering only mild smacks down Sherlock’s chest and belly and then picking up the intensity again when he reaches his thighs. 

Sherlock makes a quiet humming noise in the back of his throat, and his eyes are open now, and he’s smiling. 

“That’s good,” he whispers. “Thank you.”

John pulls away, and then hesitantly lies down next to Sherlock, leaving a little bit of space for Sherlock to close, or not, as he likes. It can’t possibly be making it easier, having an unbonded, still-aroused alpha in bed with him, but he immediately scoots back to fit his back against John’s chest, carefully ensuring that the bulge of John’s cock doesn’t accidentally slot into his crack. John smiles, and reaches around him with one arm.

“Think you might be able to sleep?”

Sherlock sighs, seemingly considering before he answers, “I’m sure I’ll be waking up often. I’m sorry. You can-- you can go, if you want. This can’t be easy for you.”

Before he quite knows what he’s doing, John has pressed a small kiss to the back of Sherlock’s neck. “For as long as you like having me here, I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “You do whatever you need, as often as you need to. I don’t mind. And I’ll help in any way I can, like I said, besides the obvious, so if there’s anything else… just ask.” 

Sherlock somehow cocks his head while horizontal, staring up at the ceiling. “Well,” he says, “you… did rather do a number on my arse.”

“Sorry,” murmurs John into the skin of his back, not feeling all that sorry at all. 

“Could you… put something on it, maybe?” Sherlock asks hesitantly. 

John pushes up to his elbow. That sounds like a _fantastic_ idea, he thinks nearly giddily, and pushes Sherlock gently back over onto his front. “Lotion?” Sherlock points him towards the bathroom, where there is a large pump-bottle of unscented lotion on the counter. 

Sherlock is right; his arse and upper thighs are indeed quite red, and fingerprints stand out in uneven splotches where John had landed particularly strong blows. John has to fight down a fresh wave of arousal when he sees it; completely apart from the omega-in-heat aspect, the fresh marks on Sherlock’s pale skin are just plain pretty. 

The air in the room feels heavy, practically otherworldly. It feels possible, now, for John to murmur “you’re gorgeous,” as he warms the lotion between his fingers. 

Sherlock sighs contentedly as John starts spreading it over his reddened cheeks. He angles his chin down to watch him do it, and his eyes narrow a little bit, thinking.

“You’re… not what I expected,” he says. 

John can’t help but laugh a little. “Expected from the new doctor in general? Or specifically from a recent medical school grad recently rejected from the Forces on grounds of alpha-typical aggression?”

“The latter,” says Sherlock. “I would have never drawn conclusions on you before you arrived.”

John’s hand dips into the curve where Sherlock’s cheeks meet his thigh, and Sherlock hisses in pain when he pushes into a sore spot. “And… now that I have arrived?” he says. 

John caresses a little bit harder, leaving him with a little bit of extra pain, and Sherlock’s eyes flutter closed again. “You’re kind,” he almost whispers. 

John is unprepared for the painful squeeze in his chest at that. He’s never thought of himself as _kind_ , exactly. Not when he decided to go into medicine-- that was more out of interest in the body than the admissions-interview pure desire to help. And especially not recently, after the letter. But… here he is, cock leaking and ignored as he gently caresses lotion over the skin of the most gorgeous, strange creature he’s ever met, and-- yeah. _I am,_ he realizes with a start. _I am kind._

Sherlock’s legs feel dense and hard under his hands, all muscle and little fat, and he finds himself massaging the hamstring as he rubs the lotion into the red marks dotted all up and down them. Sherlock sighs. 

If John is being honest with himself, he could stay here for a very long time. Enjoying Sherlock’s body non-sexually is… rather nice. But his arousal is starting to rise again, and he has no desire to be poking Sherlock in the back all night now that he has the frankly miraculous privilege of sleeping in the same bed as him. 

Finally, he places the lotion on the floor and lies back down behind Sherlock, whose cock has swelled again unavoidably. He can feel Sherlock stroking himself, businesslike, clearly just hoping to get it over with, so he ignores it and wraps his hand back around, placing his palm flat in the middle of Sherlock’s sternum. 

When Sherlock comes, it’s with a small grunt of near-pain, and then a sigh of relief. The vibrator is still humming away, and John reaches down to flick it off, but leaves it lodged inside him. Sherlock hums contentedly, and John flicks off the light on the bedside table. He takes the liberty-- which somehow barely feels like a liberty, any more-- of nuzzling into the space between Sherlock’s neck and shoulder affectionately. 

“Wake as many times as you need to,” he reiterates, and feels rather than sees Sherlock roll his eyes. “Heard and understood you the first time,” he says acidly. 

The last thing John registers before he finds himself drifting to sleep is the fact that Sherlock almost sounded like himself, there.


	9. Chapter 9

The light that wakes him up is golden and strong enough to stream through the cracks in the hotel curtains. John cracks his eye open and is alarmed when he finds two huge grey orbs staring back at him from very close quarters. 

“Woah,” he mutters, a surge of adrenaline jolting him fully awake. He starts back a little, then gets his bearings. Sherlock is lying belly-down on the mattress, his head resting on his arm as he stares at John. The vibrator is back on, and he’s surrounded by the evidence of several more nocturnal spendings, but he doesn’t seem actively uncomfortable. 

John rubs at his eyes and pushes himself to sitting. He’s clearly slept for quite a while, judging by the pleasant stiffness in his limbs and the angle of the light coming through the curtains, so he’s somewhat nervous when he picks up his phone. Technically, he’s only required to be available 24/7-- he doesn’t actually have to have set office hours. Still, he’d prefer not to be absent from his office too often during active training times. 

“You didn’t miss any calls,” says Sherlock. John winces; the time is 10:19. He hesitates, then opens his messaging app and enters Grigory’s phone number. 

What on earth is he supposed to say? _Confessed my love instead of shagging him, now possessed of an epic case of blue balls but quite content, actually. Won’t be in today, sorry!_ Or perhaps it would be easier to simply lie by omission. _Busy today! See you next week! ;)_

Finally, he simply settles on _Call me if you need anything,_ and hits send. 

That done, he scoots over to sit next to Sherlock and stroke gently up and down his back. He hadn’t hit him too hard there, so the skin is only lightly pink, unlike his arse which has now ripened to a deep red. “How are you feeling?” he says. 

Sherlock sighs. “You don’t have to stay here all day, you know,” he says. 

John’s hand stills. “Do you want me to?”

“Of course. But you just texted Grigory, I think, and he might need you.” 

John shrugs. “Might. He’s an adult, he can bloody well ask if he does. I’m staying here until I’m called away. Now, answer the question.”

John can feel Sherlock’s sigh in the rise and fall of his lungs underneath his hands. “Not thrilled, overall, but… okay. Better than yesterday. Thank you.”

They spend most of the day in relative silence; John has a few case files he needs to look at sent on from the previous team doctor, and he nips out to grab his tablet so that he can read them sitting on Sherlock’s bed, while his hand lightly rubs over Sherlock’s back. 

Sherlock seems to go in cycles of being desperately, feverishly uncomfortable, his arousal seeming to cause him no pleasure at all at this point, and periods of relative normalcy. When he needs to, he buries his face in a pillow to muffle his whimpers and thrusts into his fist, seeming relieved when the task is done. By the time the sun starts to set, he’s exhausted, and John feels almost guilty for how much he’s enjoyed having a day of total rest, his hand stroking over the soft skin of a gorgeous omega, offering small observations or quips every so often but mostly just existing in companionable silence. 

Finally, John’s own stomach reminds him that they haven’t eaten all day, and he pats Sherlock’s hair gently to get his attention. 

“Do you need… is there anything I can do now? Are you hungry?”

Sherlock cocks his head, considering. “I don’t think I could eat,” he admits. “I did some research online, during the bits of last night I couldn’t sleep. Forums and such. Most omegas say they don’t eat the whole time-- something about the biology of the heat rules it out. Ridiculous transport trying to force you to concentrate on fucking.” 

John nods. It makes sense, although it isn’t something he ever learned much about in school. In general, omega biology is left to specialists, often omegas themselves who can speak with both authority and compassion to their patients. Betas often make good all-gender sexual health specialists, but an alpha would be absolutely ruled out from ever treating an omega in heat, so John had mostly ignored that entire branch of study.

“It’d still be nice to have… something else to concentrate on,” says Sherlock. John raises his eyebrows, and he quickly clarifies, “not that. I’m quite sore enough as it is.” He actually grins coquettishly at that, and John feels a fresh thrill of heat directed to his semi-dormant erection. 

He crosses his legs, accepting the feeling and then proceeding to ignore it. “Something like a murder mystery?” he asks. 

Sherlock pushes himself up to sitting eagerly, suddenly seeming unaware of his own hardness and stickiness. “Is there something new?” he says demandingly. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

John can’t help it; he dissolves into helpless giggles. “Why--” he gasps. “Why didn’t I tell you? Sherlock, I know yesterday wasn’t exactly the greatest day of your life, but I’m pretty sure you haven’t just deleted it from your brain entirely.”

Sherlock scowls. “No,” he admits, and then looks thoughtful. “Perhaps I could. There must be some way to remove unwanted memories from the hard drive, so to speak.”

“If you figure it out, let the entire psychological profession know, okay? But seriously, I didn’t tell you because you were in heat, you brilliant idiot, and what I didn’t tell you was-- Pete, the cook. He’s disappeared without a trace.”

Sherlock is suddenly all blazing intensity as he says, “The omega. You smelled an omega in Lev’s apartment, right?”

John nods. “It’s not conclusive, obviously. I can’t nose out specific people. But some individuals of the same primary and secondary gender do smell _dissimilar_ , and the omega in Lev’s apartment didn’t _not_ smell like Pete.” 

“Pete would have had access to Lev’s suite,” says Sherlock. “The wait staff often brought meals up to him, and Pete was in charge of their keys.” He pushes himself up further, jumping onto his feet in a squatting position that should look ridiculous with his cock bobbing obscenely in between his thighs, but somehow looks… very far from ridiculous. He rests his elbows on his knees, drumming the tips of his fingers together underneath his chin, the picture of energy in need of a place to go. “We need to get to Pete’s room,” he says. “If we’re lucky, what with everything going on, no one in the administration will have bothered to let the hotel know the room is unoccupied, and it won’t have been cleaned yet. If we’re unlucky… I’ll still find something. I’m very good at noticing things. Bit of a hobby, in my off-hours.”

“I’ve… noticed,” says John drily. “So… how are we supposed to do that? We’d need to get the key card.”

“I’m going to pick the lock. Another little hobby.” Sherlock is practically vibrating. 

“Sherlock. Hotel? Key card? There is no lock to pick.”

Sherlock’s face stretches into a broad grin, an expression that looks unnatural and vaguely sinister on his severe features, and he says, “Well, not on the inside of the building, there isn’t.”

***

“Fucking hell, _no,_ ” says John, for about the thirtieth time in as many minutes. 

Sherlock is back in his baggy shorts, this time paired with a hoodie and his rubber-toed climbing shoes. The moment he’d had this mad idea he’d brought himself off again, workmanlike, flicking the vibrator off when he was done but keeping it in place while he took a quick shower and dressed. He still looks a little feverish and his erection hasn’t fully waned, but the heat seems to be receding, helped along by the single-minded focus he is now devoting to the task of getting into Pete’s old room. 

“Don’t be ridiculous, John,” he says. “You’ve seen me do this before. And besides, you don’t have to do a thing. Don’t even watch. Just wait in the hallway and I’ll open the door for you.”

“I’m not waiting inside while you risk your fucking life and I have no idea if you’re okay,” hisses John. 

Sherlock glances up from where he’s tightening the laces of his shoes. His eyes are wide and lips parted. “Oh,” he says breathily. 

“Um,” says John at the acrobat’s seeming shock, “everything okay?”

Sherlock thinks it over for a moment. “Yes,” he says slowly. “That’s… nice of you. Most people wouldn’t consider this any different from what I do every day, you know. They assume that there isn’t any danger, simply because we’re professionals.”

“Everything has danger,” says John. It’s inelegant, as a statement, but Sherlock just nods. Somehow, John actually finds this reassuring. Sherlock seems so supernaturally assured when it comes to his physical abilities, it’s easy to assume that the things he makes look easy actually are easy for him. But they’re not; they require constant tweaking and intense concentration. 

Which concentration seems to be rather the point, John muses as Sherlock steps out onto the balcony. Last night, Sherlock had welcomed pain to keep his mind off of his body going into overdrive. John is beginning to suspect that Sherlock’s obsessive physicality functions in a similar manner in his daily life, keeping a frankly overactive mind at bay. 

Sherlock knows which room is Pete’s-- most of the core Cherep employees have been in the same rooms in this hotel for ages-- and he points it out to John. it’s three stories up and two to the left of where they stand facing the building. 

Before John even has a chance to catch his breath and prepare himself-- although that’s ridiculous, prepare himself to do _what_ exactly?-- Sherlock has reached up to grab hold of the railing of the balcony above his own. A controlled kind of wave through his spine allows him to hoist himself up seemingly effortlessly, and then he’s off, and it’s too late for John to stop this thing even if he wanted to. 

He glances nervously towards the ground. The hotel is located in something of a suburban wasteland, but it is still theoretically possible to see Sherlock if someone decided to take stroll on the little path that goes from the parking lot to the loading dock at the back of the building. John wonders what he would do if that happened, and concludes that he has absolutely no idea, and will find out if and when it happens. 

Instead, he focuses on Sherlock. He’s moving deliberately, not slowly but not any quicker than allows him to focus fully on the precision of each movement. John is fairly sure that his eyes are as wide as saucers as he watches Sherlock move between two level balconies: he stretches almost to the full length of his long, almost spider-like limbs, then leans over slowly until he seems to reach a point of no return, at which point he pushes decisively with the foot that remains on the first balcony, half steppig and half jumping all the way over of grasp the railing of his target. John tries to breathe. He wishes his heart would stop beating a mile a minute. He wishes he could relax and enjoy the feat he’s watching, instead of being terrified of it. He wishes his pesky erection would go away. 

After what feels like an eternity, Sherlock reaches the balcony of Pete’s room. He waves at John, who has been very well aware of the end point the entire time and hardly needs the signal, but still starts a little at the need to move and quickly goes back into Sherlock’s bedroom. He’s immediately hit anew by the scent of heat, warm and intoxicating and utterly _Sherlock_ , a scent which smells both the way he smelled when sweaty a few days ago, before he presented, but also something new and altogether magnificent. 

John forces himself through the room, despite the strong desire to bury his face in the sheets and breathe in more of Sherlock while he wasn’t watching. The air of the hallway sobers him up a little, and he quickly takes the elevator to the floor where Sherlock is currently picking the lock on Pete’s door. 

Sure enough, the door to the room swings open immediately when John knocks on it. Sherlock is still holding his lock picks in his right hand, and looks quietly pleased with himself. The expression only intensifies when John says “wow, that was fast.” 

Sherlock shrugs, not moving out of the entranceway. “I’m good at it.”

“You seem to be good at most things. Er, can I come in?”

“Yes,” says Sherlock. “But don’t touch anything. I want to observe it all untouched.”

John steps into the room, and sees that they have indeed been somewhat lucky. Although all of Pete’s personal effects have been removed, which would have been only rational if he had pre-planned a getaway after a murder, the hotel staff haven’t entered the room. John stands to the side, practically underneath the coat hangers in the entrance closet, watching Sherlock. He’s perspiring more than John would have expected even considering how he got in, but he seems otherwise fine. Most significantly, his expression is peaceful, concentrated. 

“He didn’t leave in a hurry,” Sherlock says. “There was a laptop here--” pointing to a spot on the desk slightly less dusty than the rest-- “which he packed away at least a day before Lev died. Everything is neat, if not exactly clean.” He bounds into the bathroom, and John cranes his neck after him. 

“He shaved the morning he fled,” calls Sherlock. “Unusual-- he was in the habit of shaving only once a week, and it was on Sunday. This was a Thursday. He shaved again.” 

John moves towards the bed a little. Sherlock is undoubtedly more observant than him, but Sherlock is positively addled with hormones at the moment, and John’s had a lot more practice sniffing out subtle differences between omegas’ scents. There’s something about the scent wafting subtly from where Pete had slept that isn’t right. He stands over the bed, eyes closed, concentrating. 

He’s struck by the groundedness of Pete’s relationship with his own gender-- he was powerful and confident while still remaining deeply in the traditional world of cooking and cleaning that he would have been steered into as a young man. There’s something else, though-- oh, birth control. That’s all. But the change in the deep primal _omega-fertile-claim_ scent usually produced by birth control is… different, somehow. Not what he’s used to (and hoping to) smell on omegas he’s interested in. 

Prilogestin, John realizes. He doesn’t smell like the standard contraceptive in Great Britain, because he isn’t taking it. He’s taking a drug not yet approved for use in the UK, in fact; only available in certain US states. 

Sherlock’s pops out of the washroom, having apparently guessed that John has a lead, because he crowds into John’s personal space so quickly that John has to take a step back, looking at him with piercing grey eyes as he demands, “What is it?”

“His, um--” John winces. He doesn’t necessarily feel like reminding Sherlock that he can _smell_ him now, but there’s nothing for it. “He was on Prilogestin-- I can smell it. It’s a new contraceptive, supposedly more effective by a few percentage points, but only approved for prescription in a few US states, at this point. There wouldn’t be any reason for him to go out of his way to get it, if it weren’t offered to him-- to be honest, the ones we have here work probably just as well and with fewer side effects.”

“John” Sherlock breathes, “You’re brilliant. That’s brilliant.” He pulls out his mobile from a small zippered pocket in the tight layer of fabric underneath his hoodie, and within a few minutes rattles off, “West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon. That narrows it down a bit.”

John purses his lips. “Narrows down… what, I wonder?” he says.

Sherlock taps his mobile against his fingers, vaguely annoyed. “I don’t know,” he admits. “It is-- suggestive. The whole thing was very neatly planned. Pete would have needed access to the insulin in the first place, and to the cocaine in the red herring syringe, then access to Lev-- we need to find his employment record, find out where he supposedly came from before he got this job. He started here about a year ago, I recall. If he came here with the express purpose of biding his time until he could murder Lev, then he would have needed institutional support. And institutional support implies institutional interests. Institutional interests which Lev was interfering with, somehow.” 

“Institutional,” muses John. 

“It’s the only theory that fits the facts,” says Sherlock grimly, heading for the door, “that some sort of international crime ring is responsible for this. Now we need to find out how Lev was involved.” 

They exit into the hallway. John feels unaccountably nervous that they will be seen, despite the fact that likely nobody would know which room was which. Sherlock apparently doesn’t have the same worry, and he sets off down the hall, but less energetically than before. 

John watches his back swaying as he walks as he trots to catch up. With the adrenaline of the climbing entrance to the room and the discovery of new information about Lev’s murder, Sherlock had seemed to be of the effects of the end of a heat; now, though, he seems to be visibly slumping more and more with each step. 

“Sherlock,” says John, and places a soft hand on his back when he catches up to him. “I’m not really a specialist in these things-- okay, not at all-- but I do know that the end of a heat generally means a crash. Your body has been using astronomical amounts of energy for the past two days, and you haven’t been eating or getting any uninterrupted sleep. Let’s lay out all the facts tomorrow, and decide what to do next.”

Sherlock has stopped walking, and it simply standing in the middle of the hallway, head cocked, seemingly considering. 

Or just nodding off where he stands. That, John realizes, is also quite possible at this point. 

He grabs Sherlock by the elbow, and meets with no resistance when he pulls him into the elevator, thumbs the button for Sherlock’s floor, and then guides him into his room. Sherlock seems to have completely given himself over by this point, and merely falls into the bed and curls up on his side as soon as they reach it. 

As he watches his friend’s eyes close, John has to marvel at the wonders of the human body-- in general, and Sherlock’s in specific. The heat had been bizarre, and clearly an ordeal for Sherlock, but also… kind of amazing. Then, the man had been able to almost shrug it off entirely for as long as it took him to break into Pete’s room-- and the moment he was no longer actively clinging to a balcony, where one wrong step could mean death, his body took back over. Now he’s fallen into a deep sleep, and John can see his stomach rising and falling with his breaths. It’s gorgeous. 

He considers simply climbing into bed with Sherlock. But no, that’s-- somewhat insane. He had been invited, last night, but that doesn’t mean it’s an open invitation. 

Besides, John needs some time to clear his head. In the space of about twenty-four hours, he’s gone from vaguely lusting after his new friend, to-- what? Well, he basically confessed to actually being in _love_ with Sherlock, and Sherlock… hadn’t rebuffed him, at least. In fact, Sherlock had endured his entire heat lying next to, but not being fucked by, an unbonded alpha, just because John hadn’t wanted to ruin their chances at a real relationship by taking him during a heat without discussing it first. 

John takes a deep breath, enjoying the last tantalizing whiff of Sherlock’s dissipating arousal, and then exits and shuts the door firmly behind him. He’s going to sleep in his own bed, and when Sherlock wakes up and is once more able to think straight without a fog of arousal, he can decide on his own terms what he wants with John. 

_God, please let him want me._


	10. Chapter 10

John is woken at 5:30 in the morning by a text from Sherlock. 

_Half the chalk in the chalk closet disappeared overnight._

John stares at the screen in utter confusion. His fingers hover over the keys, trying to come up with something to say that will lead to Sherlock hopefully clarifying what the hell is going on. 

_Where are you?_ he tries. 

_Training hall. Where else would chalk be kept?_

John checks the time again, just in case he somehow misread it and it isn’t actually basically still night-time, but nope: 5:32. 

“What the _fuck_ ,” he mutters, and hastily pulls on a pair of a trousers and a t-shirt. He slams his way out of the hotel; the shuttle isn’t there yet, of course, and it would take longer to call and wait for a cab than to just walk there, so he sets off along the side of the wide road. 

When he reaches the training hall, he tries several doors before finally discovering that the only one open is the left side of the artist’s entrance. He crouches down to inspect the lock before going in, pulling out his phone for the flashlight; sure enough, there are tiny, subtle scratches on the inside. 

He doesn’t bother keeping quiet, just bangs open the door and shouts, “What the fuck, Sherlock!” into the dark lobby.

“In here!” Sherlock returns, and of course it’s coming from the main training hall, from which a sliver of light and a low, rhythmical sound are escaping.

John pushes open the door. Sherlock is on the trampoline, executing flip after flip that John can’t even follow with his eyes, let alone name. When he sees John, he bend his knees dramatically upon landing and kills his bounce, clambering quickly down the side of the apparatus. He crosses to the back of the hall and John follows until they reach a small door set in the back of the room. It is a closet, and Sherlock throws open the door and points to a shelf triumphantly. “There,” he says. 

“Why the fuck did you come here at five-thirty in the morning?” says John, ignoring the shelf half full of chalk that Sherlock is gesturing significantly at. 

Sherlock shrugs. “Done sleeping. Got bored. I hoped we’d be spending the day investigating Lev’s possible connections to international crime organizations and then the evening with you making good on your promise, so that didn’t leave much other time to train today.”

John blinks. He’d said it entirely casually, like their itinerary for the day should be obvious. But. _Making good on your promise._ John had promised to fuck Sherlock, he recalls very clearly. He does not, in fact, recall ever having made this absolute madman any other promise, so… that must be the promise to which he is referring. Yep. 

“John?” prompts Sherlock.

John tries to refocus his eyes, and turns his attention to the chalk closet that Sherlock has been indicating. There is, indeed, only half a shelf full of chalk, and the remaining paper-wrapped blocks are scattered haphazardly over the shelf. John has a suspicion that Grigory insists on absolute cleanliness from ghis athletes wherever possible, and says, “okay, yeah, it does look like some is missing.”

“Not only that.” Sherlock pulls down a block, and hands it to John. ‘What do you see?”

John looks at it. It’s about palm-sized, wrapped in white paper that says “Solid Magnesium Carbonate.” There’s a small pen check mark in the top right hand corner. 

“Someone’s written on it,” he says hesitantly. 

“Exactly,” breathes Sherlock. “They’re all like that-- every piece of chalk in the closet has a check mark written in pen. If they all have it, why bother putting it there in the first place?”

“Maybe some type of quality control at the factory?” John suggests dubiously. 

“Don’t be ridiculous. That would happen before it was wrapped. No. Someone on the consumer end put that there, since we get the stuff in bulk direct from a warehouse.”

“Okay, so, there was more before?”

Sherlock nods. “I can’t be sure,” he says, “Because we aren’t allowed to fetch new chalk ourselves. Grigory is the only one in the training hall with access to this closet.”

“So, you…”

“Picked the lock, of course. Well, I was alone, I was doing my swinging warmup and my hands were getting sweaty, what was I supposed to do?”

John just rolls his eyes. “Okay, so it sounds like we need to talk to Grigory,” he says.  
Surprisingly, Sherlock hesitates. “I… maybe,” he says. “I guess he could tell us how much chalk there was.”

John feels a painful squeeze around his heart as he understands; Sherlock doesn’t want to discover that Grigory is wrapped up in this somehow. Lev wasn’t much of a father figure to Sherlock, even if he was technically his father, but Grigory, it seems, practically raised him. Discovering that he was wrapped up in something criminal would destroy him. 

“We’ll talk to him,” he says gently. “Sherlock, he’s just telling us about some chalk. I’m sure he wasn’t involved in… whatever happened, in any way.”

Sherlock turns away, nervously rubbing his fingers together as he heads back towards the trampoline. “You can’t know that,” he says distantly. 

John sighs. No, he can’t know that. 

“I’ll be half an hour more,” says Sherlock as he climbs back up onto the trampoline. “You can watch me, if you like.”

John, of course, does like. He settles into the front row of spectator seats, relaxed in comparison his feelings when watching the balcony stunt last night. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that he’s now not only watching Sherlock’s body, but… _watching_ it. Sherlock wants him. He _wants_ him. John can’t help but turn that over in his mind as he watches his friend’s lanky yet muscular body sail into the air, turning over and twisting with seeming ease that only reveals itself in the sweat pouring off of him after a few minutes of work. 

After he seems happy with his trampoline work, Sherlock climbs down and heads over to a collection of metal bars set up over some large mats. He begins with a series of pull-ups and leg lifts before pulling a set of leather hand guards out of a small pouch and starting to swing-- small at first, and then so high that he simply turns right around the bar. 

It’s gorgeous, looks easy, and John finds himself in a sort of fugue state of watching Sherlock, imagining that nothing that looks that effortless could possibly be difficult for him or take effort. 

He’s jolted out of it when Sherlock dismounts the bar-- letting go at the front of a swing and flipping twice before landing easily on his feet-- and stalks over to where John’s sitting. 

“Done,” he announces. 

“You’re amazing,” says John, and Sherlock freezes for a moment before the fact that he’s being praised sinks in, and the corner of his mouth quirks in a barely-contained smile. 

“Kiss me, in that case” Sherlock demands, and all of the blood in John’s body freezes and then boils and then rushes into his groin and his chest and the cacophonous space behind his ears. 

Sherlock is standing in front of the short barrier between the first row of seats and the floor of the performance and training space. He’s dripping with sweat, streaked with white lines of chalk on his hands and across his hips and on his forehead where he habitually pushes aside his unruly curls during training. All traces of the scent of heat are gone, likely meticulously scrubbed off of him as soon as he could manage it, but he still smells different, now: the warm, homey, inviting scent of omega filling John’s senses a gorgeous addition to the background of pine and tang that is distinctly Sherlock. He looks, smells, _is_ , good enough to fucking _eat_.

John surges forward, leaning the top of his thighs on the barrier to steady him. He wraps one hand around Sherlock’s shoulder, and the other around the back of his neck to pull him in, and presses their lips together. 

Sherlock gasps the moment their skin touches and John has the curious feeling of his own air being drawn out of his lungs and directly into Sherlock’s. “Oh my god,” he murmurs, feeding the words directly into the taller man’s mouth and feeling them reverberate over the soft inside of his lips and his tongue, long and steady and incredibly just like the rest of him, which is now pushing into John’s mouth. 

John opens his own mouth, the adrenaline coursing through his veins now settling down from terrifying to merely exhilarating. Sherlock _wants_ this. _Fuck._ A growl escapes him and he surges forward, thrusting his tongue possessively into Sherlock’s mouth and tightening his hold on his neck. Sherlock moans at that and goes practically boneless, slumping forward slightly against the barrier so that John has no choice but to spread his hand over Sherlock’s middle back and tighten his grip even further so that he doesn’t slither straight to the floor. 

John allows himself ten seconds-- he counts them, somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind-- of plundering Sherlock’s mouth until he pulls back. Sherlock tries to follow him and he has to move his hands to the taller man’s shoulders to push him back, looking him in the eye as he gasps, “good?”

Sherlock looks dazed. HIs mouth is red and slightly wet, and John’s eyes flick from the mouth to his heavily-lidded eyes and back down again. 

“Yes,” says Sherlock softly, and with a force of effort that is entirely visible on his face, pulls himself back into his own mind. “Thank you. That was very interesting. We we need to find Grigory.” He turns away, picking up his water bottle and hand guards and shoving them in his backpack. 

_Very interesting?_ gapes John, still unable to pull himself back from the brink of the place he had just been, with his tongue in Sherlock’s mouth and his hand around his neck. He shakes his head and squeezes his eyes closed. Okay. Sherlock is right. Grigory. 

Breakfast will be just starting if they walk back to the hotel now, so they set off along the wide industrial road. Neither speak, but John feels himself almost involuntarily shooting glances at Sherlock out of the corner of his eye; every so often, their eyes meet, and John catches Sherlock doing the same. 

_Tonight._

Grigory is at breakfast, eating a pile of sausages and drinking from a mug of coffee so large it might as well just be straight from the pot. The look he gets when John and Sherlock appear together and ask to speak with him privately is somehow simultaneously lecherous, paternal, and endearing. 

They go to John’s room, and Grigory sits on the room’s sole chair while John and Sherlock both perch on the bed. 

“Grigory,” says John before either of the other two have a chance to start off the conversation, “Sherlock and I have been thinking about the circumstances of Lev’s death a little bit.” It’s the understatement of the century, of course, and Grigory’s eyebrows raise. 

“The police are investigating, as I understand,” he says slowly. 

John nods. “Yeah, they are. It’s just… if there was a reason that someone wanted to hurt Lev…” he trails off. He’s suddenly at a loss to express the general sentiment of _we think your boss was a criminal, so we’re wondering if you are too, and if so, if you’re the kind of criminal we need to turn over to the police, or the kind we can turn a blind eye to._

“Cirque Cherep is important to me,” puts in Sherlock, and the honest expression of sentiment sounds a little bit like it was gouged straight out of his soul, but he manages to force the words out. “If the highest levels of the administration here were, or are, tangled up in something that we don’t have any knowledge of, I’d like to find out about it before the police do.”

That’s actually a rather elegant way of putting it, John has to admit. Grigory sits back in the chair and lets out a long hiff of air, taking it in. “You think they were tangled up in-- what?” he says. 

“I don’t know,” admits Sherlock. “All I know is that half the chalk has disappeared, and so has the cook.”

Grigory’s face clouds as he snaps, “The chalk? What do you mean, half the chalk?”

“Exactly what I said,” answers Sherlock, clipped. “Grisha, do you know why there are check marks on the wrapped pieces of chalk?”

Grigory cocks his head, staring at Sherlock. John just observes, trying to figure out what he would be looking for if he were trying to spot a liar. Nothing about Grigory’s attitude seems to indicate that he’s afraid of anything that he knows being found out. 

“I don’t know, actually,” says Grigory. “It was something Lev did. He was very clear, when I start this job-- I only open the closet with the chalk, never anyone else. Some chalk have check marks, some an X. I only use the chalk with a check mark. First day, he show me that.” 

Now John looks at Sherlock, whose eyes are wide. “You didn’t,” says John, “find anything at all… odd about that instruction?”

Grigory laughs. “Odd? Of course. Of course yes. But I only have so much energy in the day, Vanya. Do I spend it creating beautiful performances? Or do I spend it arguing with my employer about chalk?”

Sherlock is nodding slowly. John asks, “And did you ever use the wrong one, by accident?”

Grigory furrows his brow. “Yes, I think so. Once, I did. It was not good quality.”

“Jesus Christ,” mutters John. 

Sherlock stands up abruptly. “Thank you, Grisha,” he says. “I am-- that is-- may I have permission to miss training this morning?” he looks suddenly bashful, and John finds he rather enjoys the rare sight of the colour rising in Sherlock’s pale cheeks. 

Grigory breaks into a grin, looking back and forth between John and Sherlock. “You may,” he says. “But you will attend in afternoon. You miss ballet training again, I think Miss Hudson will beat you senseless.” He laughs heartily, and pushes up on his knees to stand. “Enjoy your morning, boys,” he says, and leaves the room.


	11. Chapter 11

“So,” says John. 

“So,” says Sherlock. He’s sitting in his usual cross-legged, fingers-under-chin pose. “The organization that I have devoted my life to is a front for a drug smuggling operation.”

John chews on the inside of his cheek until he feels the skin start to give way. “We don’t know that for certain,” he finally offers. 

“No, but it is a hypothesis that fits the facts,” Sherlock snaps. “Lev was using acrobatic equipment-- the chalk is the only one we know about, but it’s possible there’s more-- to smuggle drugs across international borders. The fact that the circus tours frequently was surely very helpful on that front. Pete was a spy from a rival organization, as we’ve established likely one that operates at least in part out of the USA, sent to work here for a few years, figure out how they-- well, we-- operate-- and then take out the boss and disappear. He clearly decided that he might as well make of with some of the merchandise, as well.” 

John lies back against the headboard, rubbing his eyes, suddenly very tired. “Yeah,” he admits. “It covers the facts.”

“The good news is, it appears to have been relatively contained within the circus itself,” says Sherlock. “If we’re very lucky, Lev may have been the only person to know what was going on-- the other branches of the organization would have been kept at arm’s length. Sally is the obvious next person to question-- if there were anyone else who would have been in on it, it would have to be her. But the fact that Grigory knew nothing-- and yes, I do believe that he was telling the truth-- is suggestive. Besides Sally, he was closest to Lev of anyone else in the organization.”

John lets out a breath. “Good. That’s good. And I agree about Grigory, by the way. If that makes a difference.”

Sherlock doesn’t respond for a moment, and then he stretches out to lie down beside John. “It does,” he says, staring at the ceiling. “I readily admit my perception when it comes to my Grisha may be… biased.”

“That is how families are supposed to work,” says John. 

“Mmm.”

“Should we go find Sally?”

John can see Sherlock’s chest rising and falling out of the corner of his eye. “We could rush around trying to find her,” he says, “But now that Lev is gone, she’s taken over many of his functions, and there’s no saying where she’ll be. She certainly won’t want to work in the room where he died. But she’s been at meals, so we’re guaranteed to find her at lunch.”

The air in the room thickens, just a little. 

“So,” says John, “You begged out of training this morning to…?”

Sherlock clears his throat, and somehow that is one of the sexiest things John’s ever heard. “I thought the kissing was rather nice,” he rasps. 

John pushes himself up on an elbow so he can look at Sherlock from above. He’s spread out, limbs thrown out carelessly in a way the somehow still just oozes grace and power. His face is turned up, and though he doesn’t turn to make eye contact with John, his entire presence seems to be turned towards him. 

John leans down and brushes a chaste kiss to the crest of Sherlock’s dangerously sharp cheekbone. “Like that?” he asks, teasingly. 

Sherlock just rolls his eyes. 

“Have you…” John hesitates. Maybe this isn’t a good time to ask Sherlock these kinds of questions. But then, maybe there never will be a good time. And hell, he wants to know. Maybe needs to know “Have you ever done this stuff before?”

Sherlock’s lips twist, just a tiny bit, and John can’t help but repeat the brush of lips against the very corner of his mouth. _That_ makes Sherlock turn his head, his lips parting almost involuntarily, trying to follow John’s mouth as he pulls back. 

He huffs, annoyed. “No,” he says. “Does it make a difference? Are you going to refuse to fuck a shrinking lily, or what?”

John raises his eyebrows. “If you suddenly turned into a shrinking lily, I might refuse to fuck you on the grounds that you clearly were not of sound mind. But I don’t rate that as all that likely to happen.”

“Good,” whispers Sherlock, and then “uhhh _mmmm_ ” when John finally allows his face to drift down and press their lips together. 

John feels Sherlock’s lips move again his when he says, “Not here, though.”

“Okay,” John breathes, and puts his other elbow on the far side of Sherlock’s body, pressing their chests together. “No fucking. Anything else off-limits?” He dips his lips down, giving Sherlock the opportunity to speak if he wants to, and instead fastens them around a small patch of skin on Sherlock’s neck. 

Sherlock gasps, his spine arching off the bed more than is even remotely normal. Miles of pale throat, now marked with gooseflesh, is exposed to John’s lips, and he tries to cover as much of it as possible, sucking kisses and little bites from Sherlock’s chin down to his clavicle. 

“God,” Sherlock chokes out, strangled sounding, and John grins from his vantage point at the lowest hollow of Sherlock’s throat. So: neck, sensitive. Good. 

“I asked you a question,” he reminds the omega.

Sherlock squirms, and John can’t help but respond by throwing his leg over the the opposite side of Sherlock’s body, so that he can press his arousal into Sherlock’s groin and stare down squarely into his face when Sherlock says, “No. Nothing else off limits. And you?”

“Me?” says John, entirely distracted.

“Is there--” Sherlock ruts up so that the outline of his hard cock pushes in between John’s thighs-- “anything off limits for you?”

John blinks. 

He pushes himself up onto his knees, his arse hovering above Sherlock’s lower belly but otherwise breaking their contact. 

“Is there anything off limits for me,” he repeats, stunned. 

He’s never been asked that before, he realizes. Every sexual partner of his life, from casual hookups to serious girlfriends and boyfriends, John has always been meticulous about ensuring that they want what he’s giving them, that he doesn’t go too far, that he doesn’t hurt them. Omegas are notoriously delicate, after all, and it’s a moral alpha’s responsibility to take care of their partner. But in every manual on safe sex that John’s ever been handed in school health classes and discreet medical clinics, it’s been quietly assumed that everyone knows what an alpha wants. Alphas want to claim and fuck. They want it fast and hard and ruthless. Everyone knows that alphas don’t have boundaries, so the idea of asking for them before a sexual encounter is laughable.

Only Sherlock has just done it, and is lying back with a look of distinct annoyance and confusion that the kissing has stopped, like he has no idea that John is blinking back completely irrational tears. 

“John?” prompts Sherlock, thrusting his hips up impatiently. 

John bends down again, hiding the depth of his emotion by rucking up Sherlock’s soft t-shirt and pulling it over his head. By the time Sherlock’s face emerges again, hair tousled, John is able once more to pull out his most lecherous grin, and reply, “No. At least, not anything I think we’d get to today.”

“Come here, then,” Sherlock murmurs and pulls John’s face back to his, and then John gets his second shock in as many minutes when Sherlock deftly twists out from under him and rolls them over with one quick movement, so he is grinding down on John while his tongue thrusts roughly into his mouth. 

John expels a small “ahh!” of air at the sudden weight settling on his chest and belly. Sherlock is heavier than he looks-- or at least, heavier than he looks so long as the onlooker isn’t aware that muscle tissue weighs approximately 18% more than fat tissue, John thinks deliriously. 

And God, does he ever feel amazing. John thrusts _up,_ and suddenly realizes that he can count on one hand the number of times he’s done this before-- had another person on top of him, feeling the frightening exhilaration of not quite being able to breathe normally. And he’s certainly never been pinned in quite the same way that Sherlock is now holding him down, limbs spread over John’s erection thrusting into him possessively. 

It’s _incredible._

John spreads his thighs wider, allowing Sherlock’s erection to fit neatly into the space under his, while reaching up desperately trying to unbutton his own shirt. He wants to feel their skin pressed together, as much of it as possible, as soon as possible. “Good idea,” mutters Sherlock, and helps him out with the buttons from the bottom as John works on them from the top, ripping the shirt away as soon as they’re open and practically collapsing on top of John’s chest. 

John reaches around, hugging Sherlock to him as tightly as he can. He feels a few crackles and pops from Sherlock’s spine and loosens his grip a little, but Sherlock just sighs in pleasure and leans into it, slowing down the pace of their frantic rutting in favour of nuzzling his nose onto John’s neck. 

“You want to give me some bruises, too?” John smiles. 

Sherlock pulls his head up to examine John’s neck, as if it’s a blank canvas that he needs to decide how best to decorate. John’s lips twitch involuntarily in amusement and he tilts his head back, a much stiffer version of Sherlock’s own desperate arch, and then is nearly shocked at the electric pulse it sends to his prick when Sherlock’s lips fasten around the side of his neck and he sucks, hard. It _hurts_ , and yet the sensation is addictive and as soon as Sherlock pulls away, examining the colour of the patch of skin he’s just abused, John emits a low moan and turns his head very slightly in an obvious invitation. 

By the time Sherlock has sucked four painful-sweet patches of colour into his neck, John is about ready to unveil some surprises of his own. He grabs Sherlock by the shoulders and flips them over again, with less of Sherlock’s near-feline grace but plenty of strength and enthusiasm. He doesn’t let himself get distracted by Sherlock’s insanely gorgeous lips or neck, though, instead immediately sitting up and shimmying down far enough to grasp Sherlock’s trousers, still the stretchy black form-fitting ones he wears to train in, by the waistband to yank both the trousers and his pants down to his ankles in one pull. 

John has a few milliseconds to take in the gorgeous sight of Sherlock’s cock, jutting up long and thin just like the rest of him, and the small trickle of arousal making its way down the crack of his arse, before Sherlock sits up to pull the clothes over his feet and throw them off the bed. He’s staring hungrily at John’s groin, and obvious demand for John to do the same, so he does, and they both sit breathing for a moment, still and taking in each others’ bodies. 

John runs his palms along the outside of Sherlock’s arms, pushing him down gently. “You’re gorgeous,” he murmurs. “God, you’re incredible. You’re a work of art.” Sherlock moans, his eyes closing and a blush rising in his cheeks. John can’t help but chuckle a little, keeping his eyes on Sherlock’s face as he kisses his way down his torso. Sherlock Holmes: extremely sensitive to having his neck sucked on and his beauty complimented. Good to know. 

He reaches Sherlock’s cock with his mouth and settles himself more comfortably in between his legs. He glances up one more time, instinctively checking for any sign of nervousness or discomfort, but Sherlock’s plush lips are hanging open in a way that is almost pronographic, and he’s watching the proceedings around his hips with eyes wide with lust. 

John grasps Sherlock’s length gently and licks a stripe up the underside from base to tip, then abruptly has to pull out of the way to avoid getting a cock straight to the eye when Sherlock bucks his hips up violently and gasps “ _ohmygod_ ” in a breathy voice like he’s been punched.

John has to spread his free hand over Sherlock’s lower belly, holding him down and soothing him in equal measure, murmuring “shhh... relax, love--” before repositioning and sliding his lips down over the head. 

Sherlock’s cock is velvety and gorgeous, still tasting slightly of sweat and musk from his training earlier that morning, and John finds himself grateful for the scent; he wants to remind himself, every moment, that Sherlock is an omega now, and Sherlock wants _him_ and the enormity of his good fortune is first and foremost in John’s mind as he slowly works his mouth up and down. 

Sherlock begins to thrust, clearly neither knowing nor caring that that’s generally considered to be bad manners, and John finds he doesn’t particularly care either. He holds his mouth more or less still, just swirling his tongue slightly, and allows Sherlock to fuck up into him. The sound of Sherlock’s arse bouncing against the mattress with each thrust is mesmerizing, and the little gasps of “Oh! Oh!” sound almost surprised. When John feels Sherlock’s balls tightening against his body and his thrusts becoming erratic, he clamps his lips over Sherlock’s cock and holds on. 

He’s done this rarely enough that the splatter of hot liquid against the back of his throat comes as a surprise, and he nearly splutters before managing to get a hold of himself and swallow the rest properly. When he lifts his head, wiping his mouth on the back of his head, Sherlock’s eyes are wide. 

“You _swallowed_ it,” he says, shocked. 

John flops down on the mattress beside him, working his jaw open and shut a few times. “That’s… commonly done, yeah,” he says, and throws an arm over Sherlock’s chest, drawing him close. “Not that… you don’t have to, when the situation is reversed.” He smiles against the slightly clammy skin of Sherlock’s shoulder. “It also feels amazing to watch it drip down your lover’s skin.” 

He feels Sherlock’s shiver at that, and then his attempt to get out of John’s grasp. “I’ll-- I’ll try--” he makes to wiggle down John’s body, but John holds him tight, pulling him back up. 

“Nope,” he says decisively. “You are going to stay right here and cuddle with me. And you’re going to feel--” he turns Sherlock onto his side slightly, and pushes his front up against the taller man’s back-- “how hard I am for you. And you’re going to remember, all afternoon, when you see me walking a little funny, that it’s because I’m waiting to fuck you tonight.”

He can actually feel Sherlock’s pulse speed up from its languid, post-orgasmic state through the skin of his back at that statement. He feels him take two deep breaths before he says in his usual rumbling baritone, “Okay. As you wish.”

John leans in to press a kiss behind his ear. “You can say that again.”


	12. Chapter 12

Sally isn’t at lunch. 

John and Sherlock sit uncomfortably-- John because he’s still half-hard in his trousers, and Sherlock because he’s twisting his neck around to try to see her come in that John is surprised he doesn’t dislocate something. He’s obviously agitated by the time he’s managed to force down a piece of dry chicken-- “Hudson likes to poke at stomach pooches,” he mutters-- and they wait around for long enough that the entire crowd clears out. Having missed enough after-meal washing sessions that they no longer feel beholden to the duty, John tries to calm Sherlock has they wordlessly eschew the shuttle and set off walking for the tent. 

“We need to find the financial records,” says Sherlock. “It’d be easier if Lev’s laptop hadn’t been stolen, but at least the surface-level stuff, most of the staff have access to. There’s a document sharing system that might be illuminating, at least in terms of where to look next.”

John nods. “We’ll ask Grigory tonight, then.”

They walk in silence for a few moments.

“Ballet is _irritating_ ,” Sherlock grouses. 

“Why do acrobats need to do ballet, anyway?” questions John. 

Sherlock shrugs. “Just… part of the whole thing. We’re supposed to be graceful and shit.” He swears so rarely that it provokes a bark of a laugh from John, who glances sideways to see that Sherlock is now smiling slightly too. “Well,” John says, “You _are_ graceful. So it must have worked.”

“True,” Sherlock admits. “At the expense of a few neuroses here and there. Have you met Miss Hudson yet? Now there’s a specimen who could use an infusion of up-to-date medical knowledge.” He’s smiling, though, and John recognizes that this seems to be a loving criticism. By the time they arrive at the tent, they’ve both mostly put Sally’s absence out of their minds. 

John sits in his office for the first two of the three and a half hours that the ballet practice takes. Nobody comes in, and John is reminded from his rotations that a slow clinic is its own special kind of hell. He has nothing to do but read through case files, so he does, and makes a list of athletes whose current injuries are worrying enough that he should likely kick up some sort of fuss over them being allowed to train with no restrictions. He looks at the list and sighs-- it contains twelve names, and Grigory is going to kill him. Still, they presumably hired a doctor with an actual backbone for a reason. 

Eventually, bored, he wanders over to the training hall and peeks in the crack of the door. The ropes and silks have been tied up and the mats underneath them removed, to make room for three lines of freestanding ballet barres and a sizeable amount of open space in front. 

John knows very little about ballet, but Miss Hudson is exactly what he would have expected from a woman in her position-- older, maybe sixty, but thin like the skin had only sagged slightly off of her when she retired from a career as a dancer, instead of filling in with fat. She moves with a clipped energy that makes it look like her toes are slightly bouncier than a normal human’s. She’s giving instructions in a tone of voice that is somewhere halfway in between barking and singing, a long string of words that the assembled acrobats are hanging off of: “...so then, renverse, plie, pas-de-bouree step into fifth, and… stay. Valse forward, and six, step forward into fourth. Ladies attitude turn, plie, soutenue. Men, a la seconde, finishing, arabesque, five six seven eight. Yes?” She shows her intent with very small movements that obviously signify others, and a few acrobats follow along, marking their own version of her instructions to commit them to memory. 

He scans the room for Sherlock and finds him towards the corner of the assembly. He’s not moving at all, just watching with razor-sharp focus that John suspects means he’s probably uploading the instructions into his mind to be pulled out and executed flawlessly, tonight and any time he needs it for the rest of his life. 

Then, his eyes slide to the door, and John realizes Sherlock can probably scent him now. He lets a small smile come onto his face, and Sherlock smiles back. 

_Mine,_ thinks John posessively, before forcing himself to stumble back to his office before _that_ line of thought gets too out of hand.

***

They find Grigory at dinner, who beams at them when they sit on either side of him. “You had a pleasant morning, my Shura?” he grins. 

“Very,” Sherlock intones, with not a hint of embarrassment on his features. John, meanwhile, feels his face burning and wishes he could slide under the table, but luckily Grigory’s attention is on Sherlock. “And your new detective business-- it comes along?” He’s teasing, of course, but the intent behind the question is real, and John sits up a little straighter as Sherlock responds: “It is going, Grisha, but we need your help.” Grigory glances over at John, as if to say _is this true?_ John nods. 

“Lev’s computer is gone,” Sherlock says, “Stolen, probably at the time of his death. We can surmise that it contained sensitive information about the less savoury side of this organization. We can’t get that back, and Sally is the most likely person to have had access to it. We are going to track down Sally if we possibly can, but in the meantime, I want to have a look at anything you have access to. Artistic plans, advertising, emails from Lev-- anything. 

Grigory shrugs. “I give you my email password,” he says. “With it, you can access all that. There is a shared server that the staff use. I don’t know that it will help you, but it does not bother me to let you look.”

Half an hour later they’re back in John’s room as the sun sets outside the window, while Sherlock logs into Grigory’s staff email address on his own laptop. John, despite significant temptation to stay on the bed curled around Sherlock’s back, is going to go try to find Sally. 

It turns out to be two exhausting hours of running around the hotel, the tent and everywhere in between. John checks her room, Lev’s suite, the various executive suites the circus has rented in the hotel, and every nook and cranny of the tent, where the last stragglers are just wrapping up their extra evening practice and Grigory is waiting to lock the door. Her phone goes straight to voicemail, and by the time John returns to the room, it’s obvious that they’re dealing with another runner. 

He pushes open the door to find the door to the bathroom slightly open, steam emerging through the crack. Sherlock is taking a shower, and it sends a little shiver down John’s spine that he would think nothing of taking a shower in John’s room. 

The laptop is closed, and there is a note on top of it with a single word: “MINNEAPOLIS.”

John sits down and stares at it. Apparently Sherlock’s found something, then.

When he emerges from the shower, he’s fully dressed in an outfit that he must have gone back to his own room to fetch-- tailored black trousers with a purple button-up shirt that certainly looks like the pick of a man who’s planning on getting laid. 

He gestures to the note in John’s hand. “The location of the territory encroachment that precipitated Lev’s death,” he says authoritatively. “The troupe has performed in the US before, but the shipment records of chalk to those cities-- I gained access to the operations manager’s email, by the way, she should really change her password-- was insufficient to indicate that there was supply of product making its way into those local markets. The Minneapolis stop planned for three months from now, though, was different. The shipments of chalk required matched those for our European stops. And when the venue backed out, instead of cancelling the show as it appears we usually do in such situations, this poor woman seemed to be under significant pressure from Lev to find a new one.”

John is nodding along, mind whirring.

“Therefore, my hypothesis,” says Sherlock. “The Minneapolis stop was supposed to be Cirque Cherep’s entry into the US drug market. Pete had been planted here for quite some time, but when this organization became a threat to his own-- recall that Minnesota was one of the states we identified where he was likely to have been previously active-- he was instructed to act. Therefore, our first course of action should be to figure out which criminal organizations are active in Minnesota.”

He looks triumphant, and John can’t help but stand up and learn what his lips feel like when they’re smiling. They’re still plush and warm and make Sherlock sag into him, so he lets him go, pushing him upright again. “Well done, you,” he comments. Then: “So, Sherlock, maybe we should start thinking about…” he frowns. 

Sherlock sits down on the bed, legs crossed. He raises his eyebrows. “I have been,” he says, “all afternoon, and--”

“No,” John cuts him off, smiling a little, “And I have too, by the way, but one more… order of business. What are we actually going to… _do?_

Sherlock stills, then sighs. “I don’t know yet,” he admits. “It would be… tidy, if it were a simple matter of communicating to Pete’s organization that Cirque Cherep is out of the business for good. If that fails… the police will have to now what we know, eventually. The troupe will be disbanded, and a great many heads will roll, and we’d do better to be employed elsewhere by that time.” His face twists a little in a way he tries to hide. 

John seeks out Sherlocks hands, and squeezes them. He has to bite back every reassuring thing he wants to say, because they all sound… kind of insane. It would be insane to tell a man you only met a few days ago that it will all be okay so long as you’re together. And John Watson is not insane, so he doesn’t say it. It’s a close thing, though. 

Sherlock looks at their locked hands, and smiles. “That’s for tomorrow,” he practically whispers. 

John lets a grin spread across his face. 

Sherlock, unexpectedly, jumps to his feet. “Come on, then,” he says, and sweeps up his backpack. 

John scrambles to his feet, rearranging his trousers hastily. “What? Sherlock where--” but Sherlock is already out of the room and down the hall, and John rolls his eyes, grabbing a sweater and trotting to keep up.

“What--” he starts again when he catches up to Sherlock at the elevator, but Sherlock holds up an imperious hand. 

“You said, and I quote,” he intones, “ _Ask me again in a few days, and I’ll gladly pound you into any bed, wall, or acrobatic apparatus you like, provided the risks to my personal safety are minimal._ John Watson, I am asking, and I am choosing my apparatus as we speak, so keep quiet and let me think.”

John shuts the hell up.


	13. Chapter 13

They walk to the tent, John’s hand at one point tangling with Sherlock’s arm insistently enough that they end up holding hands. Sherlock picks the lock to the back door with a practiced ease, and they enter the darkened training hall. 

Sherlock brought a torch, because of _course_ he did. He points it upwards, to illuminate the rows of ropes and silks, and hovers it on the bright blue silk set in the middle of the mats. 

“This,” he says, and John feels the word in his bones and blood and teeth. He has no idea how Sherlock is planning to get the both of them on it, let alone have sex on it, but he’s perfectly willing to find out. 

Sherlock flicks on a single light, leaving the room mostly dim but the outlines of objects just visible, and runs to the corner of the room, where there are several wheels attached to pulleys and levers that raise and lower the apparatuses. Sherlock turns a wheel and the rigging attached to the blue silk lowers slowly to the floor. 

When the top of the rigging is hovering around the height of Sherlock’s head, he goes over to it and yanks down on a large steel ring attached to a carabiner. The silk itself is actually twice the length of the space it occupies, and is folded through such that the two ends hang down and can be-- as John has seen Sherlock do-- wrapped around both of the ankles and then forced apart in a midair split. The carabiner at the top rotates, so that the acrobat can more or less precisely control their spin in the air. 

Sherlock pulls the entire length of the silk out of the ring, then starts feeding it back in again-- backwards this time, such that the loose ends of the silk are at the top, secured by large,sturdy knots, and the bottom of the apparatus is one continuous piece of fabric. When he returns to the wheel on the wall and hoists it back up, it looks almost the same as it did when he started-- except that the bottom can be opened up like a hammock and climbed into, which is exactly what he does. 

Sherlock immediately disappears into the folds of the silks, the only part of him visible the somewhat comical outline of his back and arse in the protruding bottom of the fabric. 

John grins, shucks off his coat, and climbs in. 

It’s nice in there; the faint glow of the one light that’s on is filtered through the blue of the fabric reaching up on either side of them in such a way that it gives the impression of being underwater, or in a cocoon. The shadows of aqua light cast on Sherlock’s face as he reclines make him look otherworldly, and in that moment John is not at all sure that he _is_ real. How is this his life now?

Sherlock breaks his reverie by snarling “come _on_ ,” and pulling him down into a rough kiss. For someone with no experience in these matters, Sherlock has picked up the knack of the possessive, near-violent kiss extremely handily. 

“Yeah,” says John, “Okay then--” and then their bodies are so tangled that it’s nearly impossible to sort out which limbs belong to whom, and their teeth click softly with the force that John is claiming Sherlock’s mouth. 

John is aware very suddenly that he’s essentially been walking around half-hard ever since the beginning of Sherlock’s heat, _jesus,_ and he’s finally going to get to come and he’s going to get to come _inside of Sherlock_ which is nearly too much to think of all at once-- so he doesn’t, just focuses on the task at hand, which is unbuttoning Sherlock’s shirt. 

Sherlock just lies back and watches him do it, eyes glassy. “Brat,” mutters John. “You wore this just to rile me up. And watch me take it off you.” He arches his back to allow John to try to pull the thing off of him. John’s balance is already precarious-- he has his knees on either side of Sherlock’s hips, thighs already starting to burn with the effort of stabilizing himself on the swinging fabric-- and this action causes him to pitch forwards, only barely divesting Sherlock of his shirt before he collapses on his chest, swearing. 

In this time, Sherlock has managed to wiggle free of his trousers, leaving John fully clothed above him, which is not the point. As John reaches up to shuck his own shirt off, he feels movement from the legs beneath him. 

Sherlock is kicking, rhythmically. John surfaces from the faceful of fabric to say “Sherlock, what--” and then has to grab wildly at the blue fabric walls of their hammock in order to not fall backwards, because the entire silk apparatus is swinging back and forth more and more forcefully with each kick. 

Sherlock is grinning like madman. “Trousers off, John,” he instructs, and leans his head and shoulders back on the downswing to give the thing even more energy. 

John feels his stomach drop, not entirely unpleasantly. He obeys, and notes that the infusion of danger into the situation seems to have made him harder. 

Okay. Enough dallying. 

John lowers himself down, fully nude now, to press his entire body against Sherlock’s. Sherlock had been fidgeting, caressing at little bits of skin and trying to get John more fully on top of him, but now he goes still, waiting as John buries his face in the acrobat’s neck. 

“How do want this?” John growls. “Want me to suck you first, get you nice and ready, before I fuck you? Or just take you now?”

Sherlock shivers with his entire body, and in answer, he just digs in the folds of the fabric and pulls out a tube of lube that he had apparently brought in with him.  
Their eyes meet, and Sherlock whispers, “Please.”

The swinging has mostly stilled by now but it’s difficult for Sherlock to get his legs spread wide in the confines of the silk hammock, so John ends up helping from his higher vantage point; with John kneeling in between Sherlock’s legs, he can angle his knees outwards, forcing Sherlock’s apart. Sherlock seems quite comfortable with his knees spread so wide it would surely be painful for someone with a normal range of motion; John makes a mental note to test how far he can spread Sherlock out at some point when they have more space. Somehow, it seems like the kind of experiment that would appeal to the utterly mad acrobat. 

He lubes up two fingers and starts trailing them down, past Sherlock’s cock and perineum until he feels the pucker of his entrance. 

The moment he reaches it he feels Sherlock tense up, and then the equal and opposite reaction as he realizes what he’s done and consciously relaxes. John doesn’t push in, just massages the area gently, and he manages to plant a hand in the fabric just above Sherlock’s right shoulder so that he can lean forward and lick gentle kisses into his neck as he does so. 

The reaction is immediate; he feels every muscle in Sherlock’s body practically melt beneath him, and chooses the moment that Sherlock lets out a breathy moan to sink an index finger into his body. 

He doesn’t have to pull back to gauge Sherlock’s reaction; he _feels_ Sherlock’s channel tighten around his finger and then relax, and when he says “Yes, John-- that’s good, more--” the rumble of his words seems to travel straight through from Sherlock’s chest into John’s, sinking confidence into his bones. 

He starts to pump in and out, setting up a gentle rhythm first with one finger, then two. Sherlock doesn’t tense up again, just lets his legs slip wider when John’s knee slips outwards and murmurs “yes-- yes, it’s good-- come on now, you were with me for the heat, I’m not delicate.” 

It’s true. John saw Sherlock treating his own arse much more roughly than this, and the memory of Sherlock curled up on his bed, face a rictus of pleasure and agony as he pistoned his own fingers into himself is… not one John is likely to forget. 

“Okay,” he murmurs. “I’m going to take you now. Can I have that, Sherlock? Can I have you?” His face is still buried in Sherlock’s neck, and in a moment of vulnerability-- reassured by the strong body underneath him and the soft blue light around him-- he whispers, “Please say you’re mine.”

His slick cock presses against Sherlock’s entrance, and it’s almost lost in the sensation of penetration when Sherlock answers, reverently, “Obviously.”

He can sink inside in one thrust, slow but inexorable, and it takes John a moment of resting there, sunk to the hilt in exquisite heat, before it enters his mind to start moving, at which point he realizes the downside-- or, knowing Sherlock, probably the entire point-- of the hammock: every time he draws out and pistons back in to Sherlock’s channel, no matter how slowly, the movement causes the entire apparatus to swing wildly. 

The madman grins up at him. “You feel amazing,” he states. “Come on, what are you afraid of?”

“ _Ugh_ ,” groans John. “I don’t know-- tumbling out of this thing and landing in a heap on top of my still-hard cock?” In retribution, he teases Sherlock’s rim with the tip of his prick, using the period of relative stillness to get the swinging of the hammock somewhat under control as he does so. Sherlock moans desperately and tries to impale himself. “There’s a mat,” he chokes out, “You’ll be fine. I’ve done it loads of times. It’s good for you to take a few falls.”

“Oh my _god,_ I am not in the right frame of mind to break down everything wrong with that statement medically,” John groans, finally giving in to the inevitable and thrusting in fully. The hammock starts to swing in earnest when John admits defeat and cooperates with the damned thing, thrusting in on the upswing and drawing back on the downswing. 

And _oh,_ John has to admit this does feel damn good. The tight heat on his cock, the gratification of claiming the omega he waited for through and entire agonizing heat-- coupled with the heady sensation of literally flying, soaring through the air in time to his own thrusts-- Sherlock is a genius. 

Sherlock is also seemingly incredibly close to orgasm, if the desperate, nearly shocked look on his face is anything to go by. Normally John would speed up his thrusts in response to that expression on a partner, but in this instance, he can’t-- the hammock is swinging fast and high, and any deviation from the rhythm will unbalance the entire operation. So John simply gets to watch as Sherlock’s expression goes from pleasure to effort to near-agony, the slow thrusts keeping him on the edge for almost longer than he can bear, and only when he finally feels a bloom of wet heat on his belly does John realize that Sherlock came untouched, just from John’s cock in his arse, and feels a glow of pride. 

He stills, still sunk deep, and lowers his chest down to embrace the omega. “So beautiful,” he murmurs. “You’re so gorgeous when you come.” 

“You can keep going,” Sherlock answers, obviously intuiting that John’s mind is still very much on his erection. “I don’t mind. It feels nice.”

John does, and now it’s his turn to experience the agony of being unable to speed his thrusts when he wants to. He is no longer in charge of his own body but somehow the blue silk holding them up as they hurtle through the air is the true architect of his pleasure, manipulating him like a puppet, tightening every muscle in his body for longer than John thought possible until he unravels, finally, _finally_ filling the gorgeous, miraculous man underneath him with come, pumping incoherently until he collapses and they can only lie together, swinging.

All is still and quiet around them and the rocking of the huge makeshift hammock feels comforting instead of terrifying, now. Some sort of vestigial sense-memory takes over and John feels maybe the most relaxed he’s been in his adult life. 

Until they hear the door to the training hall creak open. 

Every muscle in Sherlock’s body tenses, unfortunately including the ones now clamped around John’s still-softening prick. John grimaces and pulls out quickly, and a sticky trail of come slides out of Sherlock’s hole and down to stain the fabric of the silk. Both ignore it, eyes wide and staring in mute terror at each other. The apparatus is still swinging, not as vigorously as during their coupling, but relatively high nonetheless. There’s no way of stopping it, not without something external to grab onto; they are literally helpless, visible to whoever has just entered the training hall as heavy blob encased in blue silk swinging from the ceiling. 

Another light flicks on, and though she’s speaking softly, muttering to herself really, Sally Donovan’s voice still carries loud and clear into the blue cocoon of John and Sherlock: “What the fuck?”

John mouths “Sally!” in horror, which is an utterly ridiculous thing to do because of course Sherlock recognizes her voice, and if Sherlock weren’t equally horrified, the insufferable prick would probably tease him about pointing out something so obvious. Instead, Sherlock just presses his lips together. He appears to be thinking very hard. John can only hope he succeeds in inventing a wormhole they can both fall into some time in the next thirty seconds. 

He doesn’t, but neither does Sally immediately investigate the swinging blue blob in the middle of the training hall. Instead, her footsteps skirt around the outside of the room, and the soft squeak of hinges rings out. Sherlock mouths, “She’s opening the chalk closet.”

The chalk closet. It’s behind the two trampolines on the other side of the hall, and it’s just possible that if she stays there long enough, they might be able to… do something. John pokes his head cautiously out of the folds of fabric enveloping them. The swinging is under control enough that holding out a few limbs will be sufficient to slow the thing to a safe speed to jump out. They’ll just have to do it quietly. John has no doubts about Sherlock’s ability to do it, but he’s the one on top an thus who’ll have to exit first. 

He takes a deep breath, sticks his legs out, then holds on to the now gently rotating silk to help lower him silently to the ground. He shivers as soon as his feet hit the matting; they’re both naked, and he’s suddenly very aware that they can’t simply run out of the building in their current state.

He feels Sherlock shifting behind him and can see the silhouette of his lowering himself to the ground as well. John can see his own clothes in a heap just off of the square of matting, and has his shirt mostly pulled over his head when he hears the click of a gun safety coming off. 

“John Watson, you’re a dead man,” says Sally, and her voice is shaking. 

John slowly raises his hands as soon as they’re free to do so. He regrets choosing to don his shirt before he got to pants and trousers-- his chest is now covered, but his slick, flaccid cock is swinging in the air, and a quick glance behind him reveals that Sherlock is still entirely nude, hands raised in the air in imitation of John’s position. 

Sally turns her gaze on him, although she keeps the gun trained on John. “And you,” she snarls. “When did it happen? When did they get to you? Have you been working with _him_ \--” she shakes the gun slightly in John’s direction-- “for years? How _could_ you? Lev gave you everything. Your entire fucking life, you owe to Lev Solomin. What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?”

“Sally,” says Sherlock slowly, calmly, “This isn’t what it looks like. Put the gun down and we can talk about it.”

Sally rolls her eyes. “It looks like the two of you snuck in here for a fuck, and I’m pretty sure that bit is what it looks like, but I don’t give a shit about that. That’s not why I’m going to put a bullet in his brain.”

Her hand is shaking. It’s unlikely she would be able to hit him anyway, but John bends his knees a little, subtly, wondering how quickly he could yank his legs out from under him and roll if he sees her finger going for the trigger. Adrenaline shoots through him, making him feel like his legs might give out anyway. Well, “If I understand you,” says John, “You’re going to put a bullet in my brain because you think that I killed Lev Solomin.” 

Sally narrows her eyes. “Among other people, probably,” she snarls. “People like you do tend to work in batches, don’t you?” 

John’s head spins. The muzzle of the gun is very dark. He is going to die, and he doesn’t know exactly what can be done about it. He wonders if Sally will kill Sherlock after him. He wonders if she will eventually realize what she’s done, and regret it. He wonders what will become of Sherlock, if he lives, and John dies. No. That’s hubris. Sherlock will be fine. Probably.

The shaking of her hand intensifies. She may hit him, even by accident. At this point she could probably pull the trigger by accident, too. 

_Fuck this,_ thinks John, _I’m not just going to wait around for her to decide when to shoot me._ She’s at close enough range that he can, if he’s very, very lucky, dive at her and get her feet out from under her before she an react by taking aim again. At least then he’ll die actually doing something. 

John takes a deep breath, as subtly as possible. _Please, God, let me live._

“I believe that you didn’t know anything about Cirque Cherep’s criminal activities until after Lev’s death,” comes Sherlock’s voice from behind him instead. The huge jolt of adrenaline that had been about to propel John into probably the last energetic movement of his life crests and then drops, leaving him reeling. Sally’s eyes flick over to Sherlock. John doesn’t move a muscle. 

Sherlock is stepping forward, arms linked behind his head, soft and slow. Placating. “When Pete killed Lev,” he says matter-of-factly, “You took over most of his day-to-day operations. You quickly discovered numbers that don’t add up, mysterious shipments that you had never seen or noticed before, contacts that you didn’t know what to do with. You’re smart. Eventually, you figured out that this organization, which you and I have both devoted most of our lives to, is engaged in the smuggling in large quantities of illegal drugs. You panicked and withdrew from the day-to-day activities of the circus-- haven’t seen you at meals in ages. Eventually, you found the same clues that John and I did.” He’s standing nearly beside John now, face earnest and open and somehow authoritative, despite the fact that he’s still entirely nude and has a visible rivulet of John’s semen running down his leg. 

Sally is staring at Sherlock now, and the gun has driften slightly away from John’s head to point somewhere in the space in between them. Sherlock slowly lowers his hands from his head, still keeping them visible at his sides. 

“Lev kept all this to himself,” Sherlock continues gently. “If you didn’t know, then we can practically guarantee that nobody else knew. He would have had associates outside of the circus business, of course, but this troupe itself was admirably isolated from its own criminal activities. John and I started looking into the Lev’s death immediately, and we didn’t go to the police because-- well. If the one person here with criminal ties is gone, it doesn’t seem necessary to trigger an investigation of the entire place. Don’t you agree?”

Sally’s large, expressive eyes glance back and forth between Sherlock and John, and she finally lowers the gun. 

John finally exhales. 

He uses his first proper breath of air in ages to say, “D’you mind if we put on some clothes, then?”

Slowly, her face breaks into a sheepish, crooked smile. 

“Yeah, go on, then,” she says, and sits down on a thick mat. She places the gun on the floor beside her, safety on, and drops her head into her hands. 

John quickly shucks on his pants and trousers, then cautiously goes to sit down next to her. She looks up at him, eyebrows raised. 

“Don’t worry about the… gun thing,” he says quickly, waving away the apology he can feel percolating inside of her but that she is currently too proud and stressed to allow out, John suspects, if their psychological makeup is anything alike. “It was a logical conclusion, under the circumstances, I admit.” 

Sally just nods, but then she adds, “I… wasn’t going to shoot you. I don’t think.” Her head drops back into her hands, and he sighs and squeezes her eyes shut. 

John is still shaking slightly with adrenaline, but he forces it down. He can feel all of this later, when they’re not in the middle of it. 

Sherlock is awkwardly wriggling into his tight trousers, clearly sticky and uncomfortable. This actually makes her laugh a little. “Little Shura,” she calls at him in a perfect imitation of Grigory. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

Sherlock just glares at her, but there’s a hint of something else in his eyes, something very close to pride. It makes John’s cheeks flush to think that Sherlock _likes_ it, even a little, that other people know John’s had him. Finally, he runs his fingers through his curls, turning his sex-mussed hair into something positively libertine. He turns to Sally and John. 

“With your access to records,” he says, “We can very likely pinpoint the organization responsible for Lev’s death. We’ve already narrowed it down to a state, very possibly a city: Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

Sally nods. “The coke that used to live in that closet was destined to be shipped there,” she says. 

Sherlock nods. “It’s now in the hands of Pete, the former cook-- you didn’t notice his disappearance, of course, because you were too busy having your entire professional life shattered around you to show up for meals, and apparently too busy procuring an unregistered firearm to make inquiries, but he’s how we traced this back. Come on, let’s go.” He grabs his backpack, and heads towards the door.

John and Sally glance at each other, then John shrugs. Sherlock is right; there isn’t any point in staying here.

The three of them walk back to the hotel together in silence. John finds that as he walks further and further away from the training hall, his exhaustion hits him like a slow-motion train. Somehow, his hand finds Sherlock’s, and seeing as Sally’s just seen them stark naked in interrupted post-coital bliss, he figures it can’t hurt to fit them together, and then before he knows it he’s sagging against Sherlock slightly, and by the time they reach the hotel, he can barely keep his eyes open. 

There’s no question of continuing the conversation. Instead, Sherlock just says, “We will see you at breakfast, Sally,” and holds her gaze until she nods.

John has the presence of mind to notice that the room they enter is Sherlock’s, and to mumble “Almost getting shot is hard work,” before the world goes fuzzy. 

He hears the water running in the bathroom and then feels a warm presence at his back, arms wrapping around him, and Sherlock whispers in his ear, “If that’s the only hard work you did tonight, I’ll have to make it more challenging next time,” and John smiles. 

_Next time._

***

“Is not surprising,” says Grigory solemnly. “But-- please understand. I believe Lev Solomin was good man. Criminal, yes. But he loved the circus, and he loved this troupe, and he cared for acrobats here.” He looks around the table. John, Sherlock and Sally are all assembled over the remnants of eggs and sausages. After all of the facts had been laid out, it had been Gregory who seemed to realize that some sort of a pep talk was needed, and the three of them submitted to his leadership with relief. 

“Just because there is this new information,” Grigory continues, “Does not erase the past. Does not erase your hard work. Does not erase whatever feelings you felt for Lev, and what he felt for you, and your commitment to this circus and this art. So: we keep working. Yes?”

Sally is the first to nod. “This stays with me,” she says determinedly. “There was never any board of directors of this thing-- that would have rather defeated the purpose, I suppose. Lev was it, and I was second to Lev. I have no desire to usurp his power. I’m going to mop up this mess: contact the gang that killed him, let him know that we’re out of the biz. Every trace of Cirque Cherep’s criminal history will be scrubbed from the books, the servers, and the schedule. I’m the only person who’ll ever know those details. Then… we’ll run this thing properly, as a co-operative. I’m happy to stay on as long as you’ll have me, but…” she runs her hand through her hair, which is now frizzy with worry and sleeplessness. “I want my legacy to be good governance,” she states firmly. “As long as this place is in a position to thrive, I’m happy.”

There is silence at the table for a moment. Everyone is staring at Sally, and it is Sherlock who breaks the silence to simply say, “Thank you, Sally.”

She just nods, businesslike. “That’s that, then. I have work to do.” She stands up, pushing her chair in: “Starting by hiring a new head cook. And I believe the rest of you have a show to prepare for. We start our tour with the new show in a month and a half.” She makes to leave, then remembers something. 

“Oh, and Sherlock?”

Sherlock just raises his eyebrows and hums at her. 

“No need for that trapeze act, if you don’t want to do it. There won’t be an abnormally large shipment of chalk on this tour, so there’s no need for a chalk-requiring act to be shunted in to justify it.”

She leaves, and Sherlock turns to Grigory excitedly. “We’re doing Wheel of Death today,” he demands. “It’s going in the new show. _Grisha._. Come on.”

Grigory just laughs. “Okay, okay, Shura. Anything to make you happy.” He catches John’s eye, and John grins.


	14. Epilogue

John scowls at the roll of tape. 

“This stuff is useless,” he declares. “I don’t care if they’re sending it to me for free, I’m not using it.”

“I think they want you to promote it on your social media, like everyone else in this biz,” says Molly, grimacing as she pulls the stiff, gunky tape off of her ankle. “You just have to post a few pictures a month of you posing with the stuff, and you’ll have unlimited tape for life!”

John rolls his eyes. “I do not promote _tape_ on _social media_ ,” he says, injecting as much acidity as he can into the idea that he would even have social media in the first place. He’s a doctor, for crying out loud. 

“You should at least start a blog,” Molly insists, for the zillionth time, as John grabs some proper tape out of the cupboard and starts redoing his work on her ankle. 

“I’ll think about it.” He privately swears to do no such thing, and has her bounce a few times on the newly taped ankle and then pushes himself off of his low stool. “Have a good show, Molly,” he says, and she bounces away towards the costume and makeup room.

John grabs some of the good tape, and makes his way towards the private dressing rooms. 

He doesn’t bother knocking. Sherlock is halfway dressed when he opens the door, his long, light blue bodysuit pulled up to his waist and then bunched there instead of pulled up over his shoulders. John has stopped asking why all the men of the troupe insist on walking around like this; there’s no possible reason not to pull the thing all that way up. Still, he can’t complain. 

Sherlock’s head is tilted slightly to one side and his elbow held parallel to the ground, waving his fingers back and forth like the Queen. After meeting a few too many handbalancers who simply accepted ulnar nerve pain as part of their day-to-day experiences, John had started insisting that all the acrobats perform nerve gliding exercises as part of their warm-up. He smiles to see Sherlock following his instructions, and glides over to give him a chaste peck on the lips before settling on a chair by the makeup counter. 

“How was warmup?” he asks.

Sherlock shrugs. “Extending through the abdominals is mildly painful,” he says. “As long as I stick to tricks with incurve shapes and don’t lose my shape in the air, no pain.” John watches him move with a critical eye. Sherlock had pulled an abdominal muscle about a month ago in training, and though John had forced him to rest from performances for a week, he was back in for a group trampoline act. After watching the act a few times and even being coaxed onto a trampoline himself to bounce around a few times, John had reluctantly agreed to Sherlock’s assertion that _It’s simple, all I need to do is the part in the air, that’s the easy bit. Really, John._

He doesn’t seem to be in pain now. And besides-- he’ll have a few days of enforced rest in two weeks. Which John is rather looking forward to. 

Sherlock turns the small dial on the wall of the dressing room, and the volume of the show in progress raises slightly. John recognizes the music; it’s a jaw-dropping silks act that never fails to have John on the edge of his seat-- both from the performance itself, and the memory of the other uses to which he and Sherlock put that particular apparatus. 

“Fifteen minutes,” Sherlock mutters, and promptly sits down in John’s lap, knees splaying to either side of John’s torso. 

“Hey,” John says softly, smiling, his face close enough to Sherlock’s to see the powdery sheen of stage makeup on him. 

“Don’t smudge my eyes,” Sherlock orders, before leaning down for a deep kiss. 

John follows him, tongue slipping into the warm heat of the acrobat’s mouth. He allows his hands to trail up his bare back, stopping at his neck so as to not mess with the delicate equilibrium achieved by hairspray and patience by the makeup department on Sherlock’s curls. Then he trails one delicate finger up further, hovering it just over Sherlock’s eyelid. 

“Can’t have that,” he murmurs teasingly. “Then I’d have to send you out in front of an audience with smudged makeup, and everyone would know that you’re _mine._ ” His tone is light, but the intent behind the words is real. Sherlock pulls back, a smile playing at his lips. 

“And if you did that,” he answers, “Some of it would surely get on you. I’d have to send you to make your visits backstage with rouge on your lips and eyeshadow on your lips. I’m beginning to think--” he leans in to nip at John’s bottom lip-- “it isn’t such a bad idea.”

They fall into each other’s mouths for a few minutes more, and when the silks act finishes and the music for the next section starts up, Sherlock pushes away, suddenly all business. John basks in the sight as he pulls up the shoulder straps of his bodysuit, the garment emphasizing his long, gorgeous lines as he moved around the dressing room, let alone when he was twisting and flipping through the air. 

 

He swings his arms a few times, testing the movement in the shoulder joints. There’s a small warmup area just beside the entrance to the stage proper, where the next act can keep limber in the moments before they go on; Sherlock will move to that area now, and John will continue to make himself available to the acrobats on deck backstage. 

“Have fun out there,” John says. He learned quickly not to say _good luck_ to acrobats; none of them rely on luck here. _Break a leg_ somehow never felt quite right coming from him, either, so _have fun_ is both a genuine sentiment and, it seems, one of the only genuinely useful pieces of sports-psychology advice that can fit in a single sentence. 

Sherlock hops up and down slightly before giving him one last kiss. “Love you. See you after,” he says, his eyes faraway, already concentrated on his performance. 

“Love you,” says John, and feels the familiar warm glow inside him as he watches Sherlock-- _his_ Sherlock-- head out the door to perform.


End file.
